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THE JOYFUL HEART. 

SCUM O' THE EARTH AND OTHER POEMS. 

THE MUSICAL AMATEUR. 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Boston and New York 



THE JOYFUL HEART 



THE JOYFUL HEART 



BY 



ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER 

AUTHOR OF THE MUSICAL AMATEUR, SCUM 0' THE EARTH 
AND OTHER POEMS, ROMANTIC AMERICA, ETC. 



" People who are nobly happy constitute 
the power, the beauty and the foundation 
of the state." 

Jean Finot: The Science of Happiness, 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

($fre ft iterate |&re& Cambrftge 
1914 



-S35 



COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published October IQ14 



OCT 15 1914 

)CI.A379995 






TO 
MY WIFE 



FOREWORD 

THIS is a guide-book to joy. It is for the 
use of the sad, the bored, the tired, anx- 
ious, disheartened and disappointed. It is for 
the use of all those whose cup of vitality is not 
brimming over. 

The world has not yet seen enough of joy. 
It bears the reputation of an elusive sprite with 
finger always at lip bidding farewell. In cer- 
tain dark periods, especially in times of inter- 
national warfare, it threatens to vanish alto- 
gether from the earth. It is then the first duty 
of all peaceful folk to find and hold fast to 
joy, keeping it in trust for their embattled 
brothers. 

Even if this were not their duty as citizens 
of the world, it would be their duty as patriots. 
For Jean Finot is right in declaring that "peo- 
ple who are nobly happy constitute the power, 
the beauty and the foundation of the state." 
[ vii ] 



FOREWORD 

This book is a manual of enthusiasm — the 
power which drives the world — and of those 
kinds of exuberance (physical, mental and 
spiritual) which can make every moment of 
every life worth living. It aims to show how to 
get the most joy not only from traveling hope- 
fully toward one's goal, but also from the goal 
itself on arrival there. It urges sound business 
methods in conducting that supreme business, 
the investment of one's vitality. 

It would show how one may find happiness 
all alone with his better self, his 'Auto-Com- 
rade' — an accomplishment well-nigh lost in 
this crowded age. It would show how the gos- 
pel of exuberance, by offering the joys of 
hitherto unsuspected power to the artist and 
his audience, bids fair to lift the arts again to 
the lofty level of the Periclean age. It would 
show the so-called "common" man or woman 
how to develop that creative sympathy which 
may make him a 'master by proxy,' and thus 
let him know the conscious happiness of play- 
ing an essential part in the creation of works 
[ viii ] 



FOREWORD 

of genius. In short, the book tries to show how 
the cup of joy may not only be kept full for 
one's personal use, but may also be made hos- 
pitably to brim over for others. 

To the Atlantic Monthly thanks are due for 
permission to reprint chapters I, III and IV; 
to the North American Review, for chapter 
VIII; and to the Century, for chapters V, VI, 
IX and X. 

R. H. S. 

Greenbush, Mass. 
August, 1914. 



CONTENTS 

I. A Defense of Joy 3 

II. The Brimming Cup 27 

III. Enthusiasm 43 

IV. A Chapter of Enthusiasms . . 50 
V. The Auto-Comrade 73 

VI. Vim and Vision 102 

VII. Printed Jot 133 

VIII. The Joyful Heart for Poets . . 153 
IX. The Joyous Mission of Mechanical 

Music 192 

X. Masters by Proxy 216 



THE JOYFUL HEART 



A DEFENSE OF JOY 

JOY is such stuff as the hinges of Heaven's 
doors are made of. So our fathers be- 
lieved. So we supposed in childhood. Since • 
then it has become the literary fashion to op- 
pose this idea. The writers would have us 
think of joy not as a supernal hinge, but as a 
pottle of hay, hung by a crafty creator before 
humanity's asinine nose. The donkey is thus 
constantly incited to unrewarded efforts. 
And when he arrives at the journey's end he 
is either defrauded of the hay outright, or he 
dislikes it, or it disagrees with him. 

Robert Louis Stevenson warns us that 
"to travel hopefully is a better thing than to I 
arrive," beautifully portraying the empti- 
ness and illusory character of achievement. 
[3 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

And, of those who have attained, Mr. E. F. 
Benson exclaims, "God help them!" These 
sayings are typical of a widespread literary 
fashion. Now to slander Mistress Joy to-day 
is a serious matter. For we are coming to 
realize that she is a far more important person 
than we had supposed; that she is, in fact, 
one of the chief managers of life. Instead of 
doing a modest little business in an obscure 
suburb, she has offices that embrace the whole 
first floor of humanity's city hall. 

Of course I do not doubt that our writer- 
friends note down the truth as they see it. 
But they see it imperfectly. They merely 
have a corner of one eye on a corner of the 
truth. Therefore they tell untruths that are 
the falser for being so charmingly and neatly 
expressed. What they say about joy being 
the bribe that achievement offers us to get 
itself realized may be true in a sense. But 
they are wrong in speaking of the bribe as if 
it were an apple rotten at the core, or a bag 
of counterfeit coin, or a wisp of artificial hay. 
[4 ] 



A DEFENSE OF JOY 

It is none of these things. It is sweet and 
genuine and well worth the necessary effort, 
once we are in a position to appreciate it at 
anything like its true worth. We must learn 
not to trust the beautiful writers too im- 
plicitly. For there is no more treacherous 
guide than the consummate artist on the 
wrong track. 

Those who decry the joy of achievement are 
like tyros at skating who venture alone upon 
thin ice, fall down, fall in, and insist on the 
way home that winter sports have been 
grossly overestimated. This outcry about 
men being unable to enjoy what they have 
attained is a half-truth which cannot skate 
two consecutive strokes in the right direction 
without the support of its better half. And 
its better half is the fact that one may enjoy 
achievement hugely, provided only he will 
get himself into proper condition. 

Of course I am not for one moment denying 
that achievement is harder to enjoy than 
the hope of achievement. Undoubtedly the 
[5 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

former lacks the glamour of the indistinct, 
"that sweet bloom of all that is far away." 
But our celebrated writer-friends overlook 
the fact that glamour and "sweet bloom" 
are so much pepsin to help weak stomachs 
digest strong joy. If you would have the 
best possible time of it in the world, develop 
your joy-digesting apparatus to the point 
where it can, without a qualm, dispose of 
that tough morsel, the present, obvious and 
attained. There will always be enough of 
the unachieved at table to furnish balanced 
rations. 

"God help the attainers!" — forsooth! 
Why, the ideas which I have quoted, if they 
were carried to logical lengths, would make 
heaven a farcical kill- joy, a weary, stale, 
flat, unprofitable morgue of disappointed 
hopes, with Ennui for janitor. I admit that 
the old heaven of the Semitic poets was con- 
structed somewhat along these lines. But 
that was no real heaven. The real heaven is 
a quiet, harpless, beautiful place where every 
[ 6 ] 



A DEFENSE OF JOY 

one is a heaven-born creator and is engaged 
— not caring in the least for food or sleep — 
in turning out, one after another, the greatest 
of masterpieces, and enjoying them to the 
quick, both while they are being done and 
when they are quite achieved. 

I would not, however, fall into the opposite 
error and disparage the joy of t raveling hope- 
fully. It is doubtless easy to amuse one's 
self in a wayside air-castle of an hundred 
suites, equipped with self-starting servants, 
a Congressional Library, a National Gallery 
of pictures, a Vatican-ful of sculpture, with 
Hoppe for billiard-marker, Paderewski to 
keep things going in the music-room, Wright 
as grand hereditary master of the hangar, 
and Miss Annette Kellerman in charge of the 
swimming-pool. I am not denying that such 
a castle is easier to enjoy before the air has 
been squeezed out of it by the horny clutch 
of reality, which moves it to the journey's 
end and sets it down with a jar in its fifty- 
foot lot, complete with seven rooms and bath, 
[ 7 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

and only half an hour from the depot. But 
this is not for one moment admitting the con- 
tention of the lords of literature that the air- 
castle has a monopoly of joy, while the seven 
rooms and bath have a monopoly of disillu- 
sionized boredom and anguish of mind. If 
your before-mentioned apparatus is only in 
working order, you can have no end of joy 
out of the cottage. And any morning before 
breakfast you can build another, and vastly 
superior, air-castle on the vacant land behind 
the woodshed. 

"What is all this," I heard the reader ask, 
"about a joy-digesting apparatus?" 
^ It consists of four parts. Physical exuber- 
ance is the first. To a considerable extent 
joy depends on an overplus of health. The 
joy of artistic creation, for instance, lies not 
so intensely and intoxicatingly in what you 
may some time accomplish as in what has 
actually just started into life under your pen- 
cil or clayey thumb, your bow or brush. For 
what you are about to receive, the Lord, as 
[8] 



A DEFENSE OF JOY 

a rule, makes you duly thankful. But with 
the thankfulness is always mingled the shad- 
owy apprehension that your powers may fail 
you when next you wish to use them. Thus 
the joy of anticipatory creation is akin to pain. 
It holds no such pure bliss as actual creation. 
When you are in full swing, what you have 
just finished (unless you are exhausted) seems 
to you nearly always the best piece of work 
that you have ever done. For your critical, 
inhibitory apparatus is temporarily paralyzed 
by the intoxication of the moment. What 
makes so many artists fail at these times to 
enjoy a maximum of pleasure and a minimum 
of its opposite, is that they do not train their 
bodies "like a strong man to run a race," and 
make and keep them aboundingly vital. The 
actual toil takes so much of their meager 
vitality that they have too little left with 
which to enjoy the resulting achievement. 
If they become ever so slightly intoxicated 
over the work, they have a dreadful morning 
after, whose pain they read back into the joy 
[ 9 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

preceding. And then they groan out that all 
is vanity, and slander joy by calling it a pottle 
of hay. 

It takes so much vitality to enjoy achieve- 
ment because achievement is something fin- 
ished. And you cannot enjoy what is finished 
in art, for instance, without re-creating it for 
yourself. But, though re-creation demands 
almost as much vital overplus as creation, the 
layman should realize that he has, as a rule, 
far more of this overplus than the pallid, 
nervous sort of artist. And he should accord- 
ingly discount the other's lamentations over 
the vanity of human achievement. 

The reason why Hazlitt took no pleasure 
in writing, and in having written, his delicious 
essays is that he did not know how to take 
proper care of his body. To be extremely 
antithetical, I, on the other hand, take so 
much pleasure in writing and in having writ- 
ten these essays of mine (which are no hun- 
dredth part as beautiful, witty, wise, or bril- 
liant as Hazlitt's), that the leaden showers of 
[ 10 1 



A DEFENSE OF JOY 

drudgery, discouragement, and disillusion- 
ment which accompany and follow almost 
every one of them, and the need of Spartan 
training for their sake, hardly displace a drop 
from the bucket of joy that the work brings. 
Training has meant so much vital overplus 
to me that I long ago spurted and caught up 
with my pottle of joy. And, finding that it 
made a cud of unimagined flavor and dura- 
bility, I substituted for the pottle a placard 
to this effect: 

REMEMBER THE RACE! 

This placard, hung always before me, is a 
reminder that a decent respect for the laws 
of good sportsmanship requires one to keep 
in as hard condition as possible for the hun- 
dred-yard dash called Life. Such a regimen 
pays thousands of per cent, in yearly divi- 
dends. It allows one to live in an almost 
continual state of exaltation rather like that 
which the sprinter enjoys when, after months 
of flawless preparation, he hurls himself 
[ 11 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

through space like some winged creature too 
much in love with the earth to leave it; while 
every drop of his tingling blood makes him 
conscious of endless reserves of vitality. 

Tingling blood is a reagent which is apt to 
transmute all things into joy — even sorrow 
itself. I wonder if any one seriously doubts 
that it was just this which was giving Brown- 
ing's young David such a glorious time of it 
when he broke into that jubilant war-whoop 
about "our manhood's prime vigor" and "the 
wild joys of living." 

The physical variety of exuberance, once 
won, makes easy the winning of the mental 
variety. This, when it is almost isolated from 
the other kinds, is what you enjoy when you 
soar easily along over the world of abstract 
thought, or drink delight of battle with your 
intellectual peers, or follow with full under- 
standing the phonographic version of some 
mighty, four-part fugue. To attain this 
means work. But if your body is shouting 
for joy over the mere act of living, mental 
[ 12] 



A DEFENSE OF JOY 

calisthenics no longer appear so impossibly 
irksome. And anyway, the discipline of your 
physical training has induced your will to put 
up with a good deal of irksomeness. This is 
partly because its eye is fixed on something 
beyond the far-off, divine event of achieving 
concentration on one subject for five minutes 
without allowing the mind to wander from it 
more than twenty-five times. That something 
is a keenness of perception which makes any 
given fragment of nature or human nature 
or art, however seemingly barren and common- 
place, endlessly alive with possibilities of 
joyful discovery — with possibilities, even, of 
a developing imagination. For the Auto- 
Comrade, your better self, is a magician. He 
can get something out of nothing. 

At this stage of your development you will 
probably discover in yourself enough mental 
adroitness and power of concentration to 
enable you to weed discordant thoughts out 
of the mind. As you wander through your 
mental pleasure-grounds, whenever you come 
[ 13 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

upon an ugly intruder of a thought which 
might bloom into some poisonous emotion 
such as fear, envy, hate, remorse, anger, and 
the like, there is only one right way to treat 
it. Pull it up like a weed; drop it on the rub- 
bish heap as if it were a stinging nettle; and 
let some harmonious thought grow in its 
place. There is no more reckless consumer of 
all kinds of exuberance than the discordant 
thought, and weeding it out saves such an 
amazing quantity of eau de vie wherewith to 
water the garden of joy, that every man may 
thus be his own Burbank and accomplish 
marvels of mental horticulture. 

When you have won physical and mental 
exuberance, you will have pleased your Auto- 
Comrade to such an extent that he will most 
likely startle and delight you with a birth- 
day present as the reward of virtue. Some 
fine morning you will climb out of the right 
side of your bed and come whistling down to 
breakfast and find by your plate a neat 
packet of spiritual exuberance with his best 
[ 14 1 



A DEFENSE OF JOY 

wishes. Such a gift is what the true artist 
enjoys when inspiration comes too fast and 
full for a dozen pens or brushes to record. 
Jeanne d'Arc knew it when the mysterious 
voices spoke to her; and St. John on Patmos; 
and every true lover at certain moments; and 
each one of us who has ever flung wide the 
gates of prayer and felt the infinite come 
flooding in as the clean vigor of the tide 
swirls up through a sour, stagnant marsh; 
or who at some supreme instant has felt en- 
folding him, like the everlasting arms, a sure 
conviction of immortality. 

Now for purposes of convenience we may 
speak of these three kinds of exuberance as 
we would speak of different individuals. But 
in reality they hardly ever exist alone. The 
physical variety is almost sure to induce the 
mental and spiritual varieties and to project 
itself into them. The mental kind looks before 
and after and warms body and soul with its 
radiant smile. And even when we are in the 
throes of a purely spiritual love or religious 
[ 15 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

ecstasy, we have a feeling — though perhaps 
it is illusory — that the flesh and the intellect 
are more potent than we knew. 

These, then, constitute the first three parts 
of the joy-digesting apparatus. I think there 
is no need of dwelling on their efficacy in 
helping one to enjoy achievement. Let us 
pass, therefore, to the fourth and last part, 
which is self-restraint. 

Perhaps the worst charge usually made 
against achievement is its sameness, its dry 
monotony. On the way to it (the writers say) 
you are constantly falling in with something 
new. But, once there, you must abandon the 
variegated delights of yesterday and settle 
down, to-day and forever, to the same old 
thing. In this connection I recall an epigram 
of Professor Woodrow Wilson's. He was 
lecturing to us young Princetonians about 
Gladstone's ability to make any subject of 
absorbing interest, even a four hours' speech 
on the budget. "Young gentlemen," cried 
the professor, "it is not the subject that is 
[ 16 ] 






A DEFENSE OF JOY 

dry. It is you that are dry!" Similarly, it 
is not achievement that is dry; it is the 
achievers, who fondly suppose that now, hav- 
ing achieved, they have no further use for the 
exuberance of body, mind, and spirit, or the 
self-restraint which helped them toward their 
goal. 

Particularly the self-restraint. One chief 
reason why the thing attained palls so often 
and so quickly is that men seek to enjoy it 
immoderately. Why, if Ponce de Leon had 
found the fountain of youth and drunk of it 
as bibulously as we are apt to guzzle the cup 
of achievement, he would not only have ar- 
rested the forward march of time, but would 
have over-reached himself and slipped back- 
ward through the years of his age to become a 
chronic infant in arms. Even traveling hope- 
fully would pall if one kept at it twenty-four 
hours a day. Just feast on the rich food of 
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony morning, noon, 
and night for a few months, and see how you 
feel. There is no other way. Achievement 
[ 17] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

must be moderately indulged in, not made the 
pretext for a debauch. If one has achieved 
a new cottage, for example, let him take nu- 
merous week-end vacations from it. And let 
not an author sit down and read through his 
own book the moment it comes from the 
binder. A few more months will suffice to 
blur the memory of those irrevocable, nau- 
seating foundry proofs. If he forbears — 
instead of being sickened by the stuff, no 
gentle reader, I venture to predict, will be 
more keenly and delicately intrigued by the 
volume's vigors and subtleties. 

If you have recently made a fortune, be 
sure, in the course of your Continental wan- 
derings, to take many a third-class carriage 
full of witty peasants, and stop at many an 
"unpretending" inn "Of the White Hind," 
with bowered rose-garden and bowling-green 
running down to the trout-filled river, and 
mine ample hostess herself to make and bring 
you the dish for which she is famous over half 
the countryside. Thus you will increase by 
[ 18 ] 



A DEFENSE OF JOY 

at least one Baedekerian star-power the 
luster of the next Grand Hotel Royal de 
l'Univers which may receive you. And be 
sure to alternate pedestrianism with mo- 
toring, and the "peanut" gallery with the 
stage-box. Omit not to punctuate with stag 
vacations long periods of domestic felicity. 
When Solomon declared that all was vanity 
and vexation of spirit I suspect that he had 
been more than unusually intemperate in 
frequenting the hymeneal altar. 

Why is it that the young painters, musi- 
cians, and playwrights who win fame and 
fortune as heroes in the novels of Mr. E. F. 
Benson enjoy achievement so hugely? Simply 
because they are exuberant in mind, body, 
and spirit, and, if not averse to brandy and 
soda, are in other ways, at least, paragons of 
moderation. And yet, in his "Book of 
Months," Mr. Benson requests God to help 
those who have attained! 

With this fourfold equipment of the three 
exuberances and moderation, I defy Solomon 
[ 19 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

himself in all his glory not to enjoy the situa- 
tion immensely and settle down in high good 
humor and content with the paltry few scores 
of wives already achieved. I defy him not 
to enjoy even his fame. 

We have heard much from the gloomily 
illustrious about the fraudulent promise of 
fame. At a distance, they admit, it seems 
like a banquet board spread with a most 
toothsome feast. But step up to the table. 
All you find there is dust and ashes, vanity 
and vexation of spirit and a desiccated 
joint that defies the stoutest carver. If a 
man holds this view, however, you may be 
rather sure that he belongs to the bourgeois 
great. For it is just as bourgeois to win fame 
and then not know what on earth to do with 
it, as it is to win fortune and then not know 
what on earth to do with it. The more cul- 
tivated a famous man is, the more he must 
enjoy the situation; for along with his dry 
scrag of fame, the more he must have of the 
sauce which alone makes it palatable. The 
[ 20 ] 






A DEFENSE OF JOY 

recipe for this sauce runs as follows: to one 
amphoraful best physical exuberance add 
spice of keen perception, cream of imagina- 
tion, and fruits of the spirit. Serve with 
grain of salt. 

That famous person is sauceless who can, 
without a tingle of joy, overhear the couple in 
the next steamer-chairs mentioning his name 
casually to each other as an accepted and 
honored household word. He has no sauce 
for his scrag if he, unmoved, can see the face 
of some beautiful child in the holiday crowd 
suddenly illuminated by the pleasure of recog- 
nizing him, from his pictures, as the author 
of her favorite story. He is bourgeois if it 
gives him no joy when the weight of his 
name swings the beam toward the good 
cause; or when the mail brings luminous grati- 
tude and comprehension from the perfect 
stranger in Topeka or Tokyo. No; fame to 
the truly cultivated should be fully as 
enjoyable as traveling hopefully toward 
fame. 

[ 21 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

In certain other cases, indeed, attainment 
is even more delicious than the hope thereof. 
Think of the long, cool drink at the New- 
Mexican pueblo after a day in the incandes- 
cent desert, with your tongue gradually en- 
larging itself from thirst. How is it with you, 
O golfer, when, even up at the eighteenth, 
you top into the hazard, make a desperate 
demonstration with the niblick, and wipe the 
sand out of your eyes barely in time to see 
your ball creep across the distant green and 
drop into the hole? Has not the new presi- 
dent's aged father a slightly better time at 
the inauguration of his dear boy than he had 
at any time during the fifty years of hoping 
for and predicting that consummation? Does 
not the successful altruist enjoy more keenly 
the certainty of having made the world a 
better place to live in, than he had enjoyed 
the hope of achieving that desirable end? 
Can there be any comparison between the 
joys of the tempest-driven soul aspiring, 
now hopefully, now despairingly, to port, 
[ 22 ] 



A DEFENSE OF JOY 

and the joys of the same soul which has 
at last found a perfect haven in the heart 
of God? 

And still the writers go on talking of joy 
as if it were a pottle of hay — a flimsy fraud 
— and of the satisfaction of attainment as if 
it were unattainable. Why do they not 
realize, at least, that their every thrill of 
response to a beautiful melody, their every 
laugh of delighted comprehension of^Hazlitt 
or Crothers, is in itself attainment? The 
creative appreciator of art is always at his 
goal. And the much-maligned present is the 
only time at our disposal in which to enjoy 
the much-advertised future. 

Too bad that our literary friends should 
have gone to extremes on this point! If 
Robert Louis Stevenson had noted that "to 
travel hopefully is an easier thing than to 
arrive," he would undoubtedly have hit the 
truth. If Mr. Benson had said, "If you at- 
tain, God help you bountifully to exuberance," 
etc., that would have been unexceptionable. 
[ 23 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

It would even have been a more useful — 
though slightly supererogatory — service, to 
point out for the million-and-first time that 
achievement is not all that it seems to be 
from a considerable distance. In other words, 
that the laws of perspective will not budge. 
These writers would thus quite sufficiently 
have played dentist to Disappointment and 
extracted his venomous fangs for us in ad- 
vance. What the gentlemen really should 
have done was to perform the dentistry first, 
reminding us once again that a part of attain- 
ment is illusory and consists of such stuff 
as dreams — good and bad — are made of. 
Then, on the other hand, they should have 
demonstrated attainment's good points, finally 
leading up to its supreme advantage. ' This 
advantage is — its strategic position. 

Arriving beats hoping to arrive, in this: 
that while the hoper is so keenly hopeful that 
he has little attention to spare for anything 
besides the future, the arriver may take a 
broader, more leisurely survey of things. 
[ U ] 



A DEFENSE OF JOY 

The hoper's eyes are glued to the distant peak. 
The attainer of that peak may recover his 
breath and enjoy a complete panorama of his 
present achievement and may amuse him- 
self moreover by re-climbing the mountain in 
retrospect. He has also yonder farther and 
loftier peak in his eye, which he may now look 
forward to attacking the week after next; 
for this little preliminary jaunt is giving him 
his mountain legs. Hence, while the hoper 
enjoys only the future, the achiever, if his 
joy-digesting apparatus be working properly, 
rejoices with exceeding great joy in past, 
present, and future alike. He has an ad- 
vantage of three to one over the merely hope- 
ful traveler. And when they meet this is the 
song he sings: — 

Mistress Joy is at your side 
Waiting to become a bride. 

Soft! Restrain your jubilation. 
That ripe mouth may not be kissed 
Ere you stand examination. 
Mistress Joy 's a eugenist. 

[ 25 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

Is your crony Moderation? 
Do your senses say you sooth? 
Are your veins the kind that tingle? 
Is your soul awake in truth? 

If these traits in you commingle 
Joy no more shall leave you single. 



II 

THE BRIMMING CUP 

EXUBERANCE is the income yielded by 
a wise investment of one's vitality. On 
this income, so long as it flows in regularly, 
the moderate man may live in the Land of the 
Joyful Heart, incased in triple steel against 
any arrows of outrageous fortune that happen 
to stray in across the frontier. Immigrants 
to this land who have no such income are 
denied admission. They may steam into the 
country's principal port, past the great statue 
of the goddess Joy who holds aloft a brimming 
cup in the act of pledging the world. But 
they are put ashore upon a small island for 
inspection. And so soon as the inferior char- 
acter of their investments becomes known, 
or their recklessness in eating into their prin- 
cipal, they are deported. 

The contrast between those within the well- 
[ 27 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

guarded gates and those without is an affect- 
ing one. The latter often squander vast for- 
tunes in futile attempts to gain a foothold in 
the country. And they have a miserable time 
of it. Many of the natives, on the other 
hand, are so poor that they have constantly 
to fight down the temptation to touch their 
principal. But every time they resist, the 
old miracle happens for them once more: 
the sheer act of living turns out to be "para- 
dise enow." 

Now no mere fullness of life will qualify 
a man for admission to the Land of the Joy- 
ful Heart. One must have overflowingness of 
life. In his book "The Science of Happiness " 
Jean Finot declares, that the "disenchantment 
and the sadness which degenerate into a sort 
of pessimistic melancholy are frequently due 
to the diminution of the vital energy. And 
as pain and sorrow mark the diminution, the 
joy of living and the upspringing of happiness 
signify the increase of energy. ... By using 
special instruments, such as the plethysmo- 
[ 28 ] 



THE BRIMMING CUP 

graph of Hallion, the pneumograph of Marey, 
the sphygmometer of Cheron, and so many 
others which have come in fashion during 
these latter years, we have succeeded in prov- 
ing experimentally that joy, sadness, and pain 
depend upon our energy." To keep exu- 
berant one must possess more than just enough 
vitality to fill the cup of the present. There 
must be enough to make it brim over. Real 
exuberance, however, is not the extravagant, 
jarring sort of thing that some thoughtless 
persons suppose it to be. The word is not 
accented on the first syllable. Indeed, it 
might just as well be "imiberance." It does 
not long to make an impression or, in vulgar 
phrase, to "get a rise"; but tends to be self- 
contained. It is not boisterousness. It is 
generous and infectious, while boisterousness 
is inclined to be selfish and repellent. Most of 
us would rather spend a week among a crowd 
of mummies than in a gang of boisterous 
young blades. For boisterousness is only a 
degenerate exuberance, drunk and on the 
[ 29 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

rampage. The royal old musician and poet 
was not filled with this, but with the real 
thing, when he sang: 

"He leadeth me beside the still waters. 
He restoreth my soul . . . 
My cup runneth over." 

The merely boisterous man, on the other 
hand, is a fatuous spendthrift of his fortune. 
He reminds us how close we are of kin to the 
frolicsome chimpanzee. His attitude was ex- 
pressed on election night by a young man of 
Manhattan who shouted hoarsely to his 
fellow: 

"On with the dance; let joy be unrefined!" 

Neither should mere vivacity be mistaken 
for exuberance. It is no more surely indicative 
of the latter than is the laugh of a parrot. 
One of the chief advantages of the Teutonic 
over the Latin type of man is that the Latin 
is tempted to waste his precious vital overplus 
through a continuous display of vivacity, while 
the less demonstrative Teuton more easily 
[ 30 ] 



THE BRIMMING CUP 

stores his up for use where it will count. This 
gives him an advantage in such pursuits as 
athletics and empire-building. 

The more exuberance of all varieties one 
has stored up in body and mind and spirit, 
the more of it one can bring to bear at the 
right moment upon the things that count for 
most in the world — the things that owe to it 
their lasting worth and their very existence. 
A little of this precious commodity, more or 
less, is what often makes the difference be- 
tween the ordinary and the supreme achieve- 
ment. It is the liquid explosive that shatters 
the final, and most stubborn, barrier between 
man and the Infinite. It is what Walt Whit- 
man called "that last spark, that sharp flash 
of power, that something or other more which 
gives life to all great literature." 

The happy man is the one who possesses 
these three kinds of overplus, and whose will 
is powerful enough to keep them all healthy 
and to keep him from indulging in their 
delights intemperately. 

[ 31 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

It is a ridiculous fallacy to assume, as many 
do, that such fullness of life is an attribute of 
youth alone and slips out of the back door 
when middle age knocks at the front. It is 
no more bound to go as the wrinkles and gray 
hairs arrive than your income is bound to 
take wings two or three score years after the 
original investment of the principal. To 
ascribe it to youth as an exclusive attribute 
is as fatuous as it would be to ascribe 
a respectable income only to the recent 
investor. 

A red-letter day it will be for us when we 
realize that exuberance represents for every 
one the income from his fund of vitality; 
that when one's exuberance is all gone, his 
income is temporarily exhausted; and that 
he cannot go on living at the same rate with- 
out touching the principal. The hard-headed, 
harder-worked American business man is ad- 
mittedly clever and prudent about money 
matters. But when he comes to deal with 
immensely more important matters such as 
[ 32 ] 



THE BRIMMING CUP 

life, health, and joy, he often needs a guardian. 
He has not yet grasped the obvious truth that 
a man's fund of vitality ought to be adminis- 
tered upon at least as sound a business basis 
as his fund of dollars. The principal should 
not be broken into for living expenses during 
a term of at least ninety-nine years. (Metch- 
nikoff says that this term is one hundred and 
twenty or so if you drink enough of the Bul- 
garian bacillus.) And one should not be 
content with anything short of a substantial 
rate of interest. 

In one respect this life-business is a simpler 
thing to manage than the dollar-business. 
For, in the former, if the interest comes in 
regularly and unimpaired, you may know that 
the principal is safe, while in the dollar-busi- 
ness they may be paying your interest out 
of your principal, and you none the wiser 
until the crash. But here the difference 
ceases. For if little or no vital interest comes 
in, your generous scale of living is pinched. 
You may defer the catastrophe a little by 
[ 33 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

borrowing short-time loans at a ruinous rate 
from usurious stimulants, giving many pounds 
of flesh as security. But soon Shylock fore- 
closes and you are forced to move with your 
sufferings to the slums and ten-cent lodging- 
houses of Life. Moreover, you must face a 
brutal dispossession from even the poor flat 
or dormitory cot you there occupy — out 
amid the snows and blasts — 

"Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form" 

there to pay slack life's "arrears of pain, 
darkness, and cold." 

The reason why every day is a joy to the 
normal child is that he fell heir at birth to a 
fortune of vitality and has not yet had time 
to squander all his substance in riotous or 
thoughtless living, or to overdraw his account 
in the Bank of Heaven on Earth. Every one 
of his days is a joy — that is, except in so far 
as his elders have impressed their tired stand- 
ards of behavior too masterfully upon him. 
"Happy as a child" — the commonness of the 
[ 34 ] 






THE BRIMMING CUP 

phrase is in itself a commentary. In order to 
remain as happy as this for a century or so, 
all that a child has to do is to invest his vital- 
ity on sound business principles, and never 
overdraw or borrow. I shall not here go into 
the myriad details of just how to invest and 
administer one's vitality. For there is no 
dearth of wise books and physicians and "Mas- 
ters of the Inn," competent to mark out sound 
business programs of work, exercise, rec- 
reation, and regimen for body, mind, and 
spirit; while all that you must contribute to 
the enterprise is the requisite comprehension, 
time, money, and will-power. You see, I am 
not a professor of vital commerce and in- 
vestment; I am a stump-speaker, trying to 
induce the voters to elect a sound business 
administration. 

I believe that the blessings of climate give 
us of North America less excuse than most 
other people for failing to put such an adminis- 
tration into office. It is noteworthy that many 
of the Europeans who have recently written 
[35 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

their impressions of the United States imagine 
that Colonel Roosevelt's brimming cup of 
vitality is shared by nearly the whole nation. 
If it only were! But the fact that these ob- 
servers think so would seem to confirm our 
belief that our own cup brims over more 
plentifully than that of Europe. This is 
probably due to the exhilarating climate 
which makes America — physically, at least, 
though not yet economically and socially — 
the promised land. 

Of course I realize the absurdity of urging 
the great majority of human beings to keep 
within their vital incomes. To ask the 
overworked, under-fed, under-rested, under- 
played, shoddily dressed, over-crowded masses 
of humanity why they are not exuberant, is 
to ask again, with Marie Antoinette, why the 
people who are starving for bread do not eat 
cake. The fact is that to keep within one's 
income to-day, either financially or vitally, 
is an aristocratic luxury that is absolutely 
denied to the many. Most men — the rich 
[ 36 ] 



THE BRIMMING CUP 

as well as the poor — stumble through life three 
parts dead. The ruling class, if it had the will 
and the skill, might awaken itself to fullness 
of life. But only a comparatively few of the 
others could, because the world is conducted 
on a principle which makes it even less possi- 
ble for them to store up a little hoard of 
vitality in their bodies against a rainy day 
than to store up an overplus of dollars in the 
savings bank. 

I think that this state of things is very 
different from the one which the fathers 
contemplated in founding our nation. When 
they undertook to secure for us all "life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," they 
did not mean a bare clinging to existence, 
liberty to starve, and the pursuit of a nimble 
happiness by the lame, the halt, and the blind. 
They meant fullness of life, liberty in the 
broadest sense, both outer and inner, and that 
almost certain success in the attainment of 
happiness which these two guarantee a man. 
In a word, the fathers meant to offer us 
[ 37 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

all a good long draft of the brimming cup 
with the full sum of benefits implied by that 
privilege. For the vitalized man possesses 
real life and liberty, and finds happiness 
usually at his disposal without putting him- 
self to the trouble of pursuit. 

I can imagine the good fathers' chagrin if 
they are aware to-day of how things have 
gone on in their republic. Perhaps they 
realize that the possibility of exuberance has 
now become a special privilege. And if they 
are still as wise as they once were, they will 
be doubly exasperated by this state of affairs 
because they will see that it is needless. It 
has been proved over and over again that 
modern machinery has removed all real neces- 
sity for poverty and overwork. There is 
enough to go 'round. Under a more demo- 
cratic system we might have enough of the 
necessities and reasonable comforts of life to 
supply each of the hundred million Americans, 
if every man did no more than a wholesome 
amount of productive labor in a day and had 
r 38 1 



THE BRIMMING CUP 

the rest of his time for constructive leisure 
and real living. 

On the same terms there is likewise enough 
exuberance to go 'round. The only obstacle 
to placing it within the reach of all exists in 
men's minds. Men are still too inert and 
blindly conservative to stand up together 
and decree that industry shall be no longer 
conducted for the inordinate profit of the 
few, but for the use of the many. Until that 
day comes, the possibility of exuberance will 
remain a special privilege. 

In the mean while it is too bad that the 
favored classes do not make more use of this 
privilege. It is absurd that such large num- 
bers of them are still as far from exuberance 
as the unprivileged. They keep reducing their 
overplus of vitality to an under-minus of it 
by too much work and too foolish play, by 
plain thinking and high living and the dissi- 
pation of maintaining a pace too swift for 
their as yet unadjusted organisms. They keep 
their house of life always a little chilly by 
\ 39 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

opening the windows before the furnace has 
had a chance to take the chill out of the 
rooms. 

If we would bring joy to the masses why 
not first vitalize the classes? If the latter 
can be led to develop a fondness for that 
brimming cup which is theirs for the asking, 
a long step will be taken toward the possi- 
bility of overflowing life for all. The classes 
will come to realize that, even from a selfish 
point of view, democracy is desirable; that 
because man is a social animal, the best-being 
of the one is inseparable from the best-being 
of the many; that no one can be perfectly 
exuberant until all are exuberant. Jean 
Finot is right: "True happiness is so much the 
greater and deeper in the proportion that it 
embraces and unites in a fraternal chain 
more men, more countries, more worlds." 

But the classes may also be moved by in- 
stincts less selfish. For the brimming cup has 
this at least in common with the cup that 
inebriates: its possessor is usually filled with a 
f 40 1 



THE BRIMMING CUP 

generous — if sometimes maudlin — anxiety 
to have others enjoy his own form of bever- 
age. The present writer is a case in point. 
His reason for making this book lay in a con- 
vivial desire to share with as many as possible 
the contents of a newly acquired brimming 
cup. Before getting hold of this cup, the 
writer would have looked with an indifferent 
and perhaps hostile eye upon the proposition 
to make such a blessing generally available. 
But now he cannot for the life of him see 
how any one whose body, mind, and spirit 
are alive and reasonably healthy can help 
wishing the same jolly good fortune for all 
mankind. 

Horace Traubel records that the aged Walt 
Whitman was once talking philosophy with 
some of his friends when an intensely bored 
youngster slid down from his high chair and 
remarked to nobody in particular: "There's 
too much old folk here for me!" 

"For me, too," cried the poet with one of 
his hearty laughs. "We are all of us a good 
[ 41 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

deal older than we need to be, than we think 
we are. Let's all get young again." 

Even so ! Here 's to eternal youth for every 
one. And here's to the hour when we may 
catch the eye of humanity and pledge all 
brother men in the brimming cup. 



E 



III 

ENTHUSIASM 

NTHUSIASM is exuberance-with-a-mo- 



tive. It is the power that makes the 
world go 'round. The old Greeks who christ- 
ened it knew that it was the god-energy in 
the human machine. Without its driving force 
nothing worth doing has ever been done. It 
is man's dearest possession. Love, friendship, 
religion, altruism, devotion to hobby or 
career — all these, and most of the other good 
things in life, are forms of enthusiasm. A 
medicine for the most diverse ills, it alleviates 
both the pains of poverty and the boredom 
of riches. Apart from it man's heart is seldom 
joyful. Therefore it should be husbanded 
with zeal and spent with wisdom. 

To waste it is folly; to misuse it, disaster. 
Por it is safe to utilize this god-energy only 
in its own proper sphere. Enthusiasm moves 
[43 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

the human vessel. To let it move the rudder, 
too, is criminal negligence. Brahms once 
made a remark somewhat to this effect: The 
reason why there is so much bad music in 
the world is that composers are in too much of 
a hurry. When an inspiration comes to them, 
what do they do? Instead of taking it out for 
a long, cool walk, they sit down at once to 
work it up, but let it work them up instead into 
an absolutely uncritical enthusiasm in which 
every splutter of the goose-quill looks to them 
like part of a swan-song. 

Love is blind, they say. This is an exag- 
geration. But it is based on the fact that en- 
thusiasm, whether it appears as love, or in 
any other form, always has trouble with its 
eyes. In its own place it is incomparably 
efficient; only keep it away from the pilot- 
house ! 

Since this god-energy is the most precious 

and important thing that we have, why should 

our word for its possessor have sunk almost 

to the level of a contemptuous epithet? 

[ 44 ] 



ENTHUSIASM 

Nine times in ten we apply it to the man who 
allows his enthusiasm to steer his vessel. It 
would be full as logical to employ the word 
"writer" for one who misuses his literary gift 
in writing dishonest advertisements. When 
we speak of an "enthusiast" to-day, we 
usually mean a person who has all the ill- 
judging impulsiveness of a child without its 
compensating charm, and is therefore not to 
be taken seriously. " He 's only an enthu- 
siast!" This has been said about Columbus 
and Christ and every other great man who 
ever lived. 

But besides its poor sense of distance 
and direction, men have another complaint 
against enthusiasm. They think it insincere 
on account of its capacity for frequent and 
violent fluctuation in temperature. In his 
"Creative Evolution," Bergson shows how 
"our most ardent enthusiasm, as soon as it 
is externalized into action, is so naturally 
congealed into the cold calculation of interest 
or vanity, the one so easily takes the shape of 
[ 45 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

the other, that we might confuse them to- 
gether, doubt our own sincerity, deny good- 
ness and love, if we did not know that the 
dead retain for a time the features of the 
living." 

The philosopher then goes on to show how, 
when we fall into this confusion, we are un- 
just to enthusiasm, which is the materializa- 
tion of the invisible breath of life itself. It 
is "the spirit." The action it induces is "the 
letter." These constitute two different and 
often antagonistic movements. The letter 
kills the spirit. But when this occurs we are 
apt to mistake the slayer for the slain and 
impute to the ardent spirit all the cold vices 
of its murderer. Hence, the taint of insin- 
cerity that seems to hang about enthusiasm 
is, after all, nothing but illusion. To be just 
we should discount this illusion in advance 
as the wise man discounts discouragement. 
And the epithet for the man whose lungs are 
large with the breath of life should cease to 
be a term of reproach. 

[ 46 ] 



ENTHUSIASM 

Enthusiasm is the prevailing characteristic 
of the child and of the adult who does memor- 
able things. The two are near of kin and bear 
a family resemblance. Youth trails clouds 
of glory. Glory often trails clouds of youth. 
Usually the eternal man is the eternal boy; 
and the more of a boy he is, the more of a 
man. The most conventional-seeming great 
men possess as a rule a secret vein of eternal- 
boyishness. Our idea of Brahms, for example, 
is of a person hopelessly mature and respect- 
able. But we open Kalbeck's new biography 
and discover him climbing a tree to conduct 
his chorus while swaying upon a branch; or, 
in his fat forties, playing at frog-catching like 
a five-year-old. 

The prominent American is no less youth- 
ful. Not long ago one of our good gray men 
of letters was among his children, awaiting 
dinner and his wife. Her footsteps sounded 
on the stairs. "Quick, children!" he ex- 
claimed. "Here's mother. Let's hide under 
the table and when she comes in we'll rush 
[47] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

out on all-fours and pretend we're bears." 
The maneuver was executed with spirit. At 
the preconcerted signal, out they all waddled 
and galumphed with horrid grunts — only 
to find something unfamiliar about mother's 
skirt, and, glancing up, to discover that it 
hung upon a strange and terrified guest. 

The biographers have paid too little atten- 
tion to the god-energy of their heroes. I 
think that it should be one of the crowning 
achievements of biography to communicate 
to the reader certain actual vibrations of the 
enthusiasm that filled the scientist or philos- 
opher for truth; the patriot for his country; 
the artist for beauty and self-expression; the 
altruist for humanity; the discoverer for 
knowledge; the lover or friend for a kindred 
soul; the prophet, martyr, or saint for his 
god. 

Every lover, according to Emerson, is a 

poet. Not only is this true, but every one of 

us, when in the sway of any enthusiasm, has 

in him something creative. Therefore a 

[ 48 ] 



ENTHUSIASM 

record of the most ordinary person's enthu- 
siasms should prove as well worth reading as 
the ordinary record we have of the extra- 
ordinary person's life if written with the usual 
neglect of this important subject. Now I 
should like to try the experiment of sketch- 
ing in outline a new kind of biography. It 
would consist entirely of the record of an 
ordinary person's enthusiasms. But, as I 
know no other life-story so well as my own, 
perhaps the reader will pardon me for abiding 
in the first person singular. He may grant 
pardon the more readily if he realizes the 
universality of this offense among writers. 
For it is a fact that almost all novels, stories, 
poems, and essays are only more or less 
cleverly disguised autobiography. So here 
follow some of my enthusiasms in a new 
chapter. 



IV 

A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS 
I 

r[ looking back over my own life, a series 
of enthusiasms would appear to stand out 
as a sort of spinal system, about which are 
grouped as tributaries all the dry bones and 
other minor phenomena of existence. Or, 
rather, enthusiasm is the deep, clear, spark- 
ling stream which carries along and solves and 
neutralizes, if not sweetens, in its impetuous 
flow life's rubbish and superfluities of all 
kinds, such as school, the Puritan Sabbath, 
boot and hair-brushing, polite and unpolemic 
converse with bores, prigs, pedants, and 
shorter catechists — and so on all the way 
down between the shores of age to the higher 
mathematics, bank failures, and the occa- 
sional editor whose word is not as good as his 
bond. 

[50] 






A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS 

My first enthusiasm was for good things 
to eat. It was stimulated by that priceless 
asset, a virginal palate. But here at once 
the medium of expression fails. For what 
may words presume to do with the flavor of 
that first dish of oatmeal; with the first pear, 
grape, watermelon; with the Bohemian roll 
called Hooska, besprinkled with poppy and 
mandragora; or the wondrous dishes which 
our Viennese cook called Aepfelstrudel and 
Scheiterhaufen? The best way for me to 
express my reaction to each of these delica- 
cies would be to play it on the 'cello. The 
next best would be to declare that they tasted 
somewhat better than Eve thought the apple 
was going to taste. But how absurdly in- 
adequate this sounds! I suppose the truth is 
that such enthusiasms have become too utterly 
congealed in our blase minds when at last these 
minds have grown mature enough to grasp the 
principles of penmanship. So that whatever 
has been recorded about the sensations of ex- 
treme youth is probably all false. Why, even 
[51 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy," — 

as Wordsworth revealed in his "Ode 
on Immortality." And though Tennyson 
pointed out that we try to revenge our- 
selves by lying about heaven in our ma- 
turity, this does not serve to correct a single 
one of crabbed age's misapprehensions about 
youth. 

Games next inflamed my fancy. More 
than dominoes or Halma, lead soldiers ap- 
pealed to me, and tops, marbles, and battle- 
dore and shuttlecock. Through tag, fire- 
engine, pom-pom-pull-away, hide-and-seek, 
baseball, and boxing, I came to tennis, which 
I knew instinctively was to be my athletic 
grand passion. Perhaps I was first attracted 
by the game's constant humor which was for- 
ever making the ball imitate or caricature 
humanity, or beguiling the players to act like 
solemn automata. For children are usually 
quicker than grown-ups to see these droll 
resemblances. I came by degrees to like the 
game's variety, its tense excitement, its beauty 
[ 52] 



A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS 

of posture and curve. And before long I 
vaguely felt what I later learned consciously: 
that tennis is a sure revealer of character. 
Three sets with a man suffice to give one a 
working knowledge of his moral equipment; 
six, of his chief mental traits; and a dozen, 
of that most important, and usually veiled 
part of him, his subconscious personality. 
Young people of opposite sexes are sometimes 
counseled to take a long railway journey 
together before deciding on a matrimonial 
merger. But I would respectfully advise 
them rather to play "singles" with each other 
before venturing upon a continuous game of 
doubles. 

The collecting mania appeared some time 
before tennis. I first collected ferns under a 
crag in a deep glen. Mere amassing soon 
gave way to discrimination, which- led to 
picking out a favorite fern. This was chosen, 
I now realize, with a woeful lack of fine feel- 
ing. I called it "The Alligator" from its 
fancied resemblance to my brother's alli- 
[ 53 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

gator-skin traveling-bag. But admiration of 
this fern brought a dawning consciousness 
that certain natural objects were preferable 
to others. This led, in years, to an enthu- 
siasm for collecting impressions of the beauty, 
strength, sympathy, and significance of 
nature. The Alligator fern, as I still call it, 
has become a symbolic thing to me; and the 
sight of it now stands for my supreme or 
best-loved impression, not alone in the world 
of ferns, but also in each department of na- 
ture. Among forests it symbolizes the im- 
memorial incense cedars and redwoods of the 
Yosemite; among shores, those of Capri and 
Monterey; among mountains, the glowing one 
called Isis as seen at dawn from the depths 
of the Grand Cafion. 



Next, I collected postage-stamps. I know 

that it is customary to-day for writers to 

sneer at this pursuit. But surely they have 

forgotten its variety and subtlety; its demand 

[ 54 ] 



A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS 

on the imagination; how it makes history and 
geography live, and initiates one painlessly 
into the mysteries of the currency of all 
nations. Then what a tonic it is for the 
memory! Only think of the implications of 
the annual price-catalogue! Soon after the 
issue of this work, every collector worthy 
the name has almost unconsciously filed away 
in his mind the current market values of 
thousands of stamps. And he can tell you 
offhand, not only their worth in the normal 
perforated and canceled condition, but also 
how their values vary if they are uncanceled, 
unperforated, embossed, rouletted, surcharged 
with all manner of initials, printed by mistake 
with the king standing on his head, or water- 
marked anything from a horn of plenty to 
the seven lean kine of Egypt. This feat of 
memory is, moreover, no hardship at all, 
for the enthusiasm of the normal stamp- 
collector is so potent that its proprietor 
has only to stand by and let it do all the 
work. 

[55 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

We often hear that the wealthy do not 
enjoy their possessions. This depends entirely 
upon the wealthy. That some of them enjoy 
their treasures giddily, madly, my own ex- 
perience proves. For, as youthful stamp- 
collectors went in those days, I was a phila- 
telic magnate. By inheritance, by the ceaseless 
and passionate trading of duplicates, by 
rummaging in every available attic, by cor- 
respondence with a wide circle of foreign 
missionaries, and by delivering up my whole 
allowance, to the dealers, I had amassed a 
collection of several thousand varieties. 
Among these were such gems as all of the 
triangular Cape of Good Hopes, almost all of 
the early Persians, and our own spectacular 
issue of 1869 unused, including the one 
on which the silk-stockinged fathers are 
signing the Declaration of Independence. 
Such possessions as these I well-nigh wor- 
shiped. 

Even to-day, after having collected no 
stamps for a generation, the chance sight of 
[ 56 1 






A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS 

an "approval sheet," with its paper-hinged 
reminders of every land, gives me a curious 
sensation. There visit my spine echoes of 
the thrills that used to course it on similar 
occasions in boyhood. These were the days 
when my stamps had formed for me mental 
pictures — more or less accurate — of each 
country from Angola to Zululand, its history, 
climate, scenery, inhabitants, and rulers. To 
possess its rarest stamp was mysteriously 
connected in my mind with being given the 
freedom of the land itself, and introduced 
with warm recommendations to its genius 
loci. 

Even old circulars issued by dealers, now 
long gone to stampless climes, have power 
still to raise the ghost of the vanished glamour. 
I prefer those of foreign dealers because their 
English has the quaint, other-world atmos- 
phere of what they dealt in. The other day 
I found in an old scrapbook a circular from 
Vienna, which annihilated a score of years 
with its very first words: 
[ 57] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 
CLEARING 

OF A LARGE PART OF MY RETAIL DEPOSITORY 

Being lately so much engaged into my whole- 
sale business ... I have made up my mind to 
sell out a large post of my retail-stamps at under- 
prices. They are rests of larger collections con- 
taining for the most, only older marks and not 
thrash possibly put together purposedly as they 
used to be composed by the other dealers and con- 
taining therefore mostly but worthless and use- 
less nouveautes of Central America. 

Before continuing this persuasive flow, the 
dealer inserts a number of testimonials like the 
following. He calls them: 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

Sent package having surpassed my expertations 
I beg to remit by to days post-office-ordres Mk. 
100. Kindly please send me by return of post 
offered album wanted for retail sale. 

G. B — Hannover. 

The dealer now comes to his peroration: 

I beg to call the kind of attention of every buyer 
to the fact of my selling all these packages and 
albums with my own loss merely for clearings 

r 58 1 



A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS 

sake of my retail business and in order to get rid 
of them as much and as soon as possible. With 
25-60 % abatement I give stamps and whole 
things to societies against four weeks calculation. 
All collectors are bound to oblige themselves 
by writing contemporaneously with sending in 
the depository amount to make calculation within 
a week as latest term. 

It is enough! As I read, the old magic en- 
folds me, and I am seized with longing to 
turn myself into a society of collectors and 
to implore the altruistic dealer "kindly please" 
to send me, at a prodigious "abatement," 
"stamps and whole things against four weeks 
calculation." 

in 

The youngest children of large families 
are apt to be lonely folk, somewhat retired 
and individualistic in their enthusiasms. I 
was such a child, blessed by circumstances 
with few playfellows and rather inclined to 
sedentary joys. Even when I reached the 
barbaric stage of evolution where youth is 
gripped by enthusiasm for the main pursuits 
[59] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

of his primitive ancestors, I was fain to enjoy 
these in the more sophisticated forms natural 
to a lonely young city-dweller. 

When stamps had passed their zenith I was 
filled with a lust for slaughter. Fish were at 
first the desired victims. Day after day I 
sat watching a hopelessly buoyant cork re- 
fuse to bob into the depths of the muddy and 
torpid Cuyahoga. I was like some fond par- 
ent, hoping against hope to see his child out- 
live the flippant period and dive beneath the 
surface of things, into touch with the great 
living realities. And when the cork finally 
marked a historic epoch by vanishing, and 
a small, inert, and intensely bored sucker was 
pulled in hand over hand, I felt thrills of 
gratified longing and conquest old and strong 
as the race. 

But presently I myself was drawn, like the 
cork, beneath the superficial surface of the 
angler's art. For in the public library I 
chanced on a shelf of books, that told about 
fishing of a nobler, jollier, more seductive 
[ 60 ] 



A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS 

sort. At once I was consumed with a passion 
for five-ounce split-bamboo fly-rods, ethereal 
leaders, double-tapered casting-lines of braided 
silk, and artificial flies more fair than birds 
of paradise. Armed in spirit, with all these, 
I waded the streams of England with kindly 
old Isaak Walton, and ranged the Restigouche 
with the predecessors of Henry van Dyke. 
These dreams brought with them a certain 
amount of satisfaction — about as much 
satisfaction as if they had come as guests to 
a surprise party, each equipped with a small 
sandwich and a large appetite. The visions 
were pleasant, of course, but they cried out, 
and made me cry out, for action. There were 
no trout, to be sure, within a hundred miles, 
and there was no way of getting to any 
trouty realm of delight. But I did what I 
could to be prepared for the blessed hour when 
we should meet. I secured five new sub- 
scriptions or so to "The Boys' Chronicle" 
(let us call it), and received in return a fly-rod 
so flimsy that it would have resolved itself 
[ 61 J 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

into its elements at sight of a half-pound 
trout. It was destined, though, never to 
meet with this embarrassment. 

My casting-line bore a family resemblance 
to grocery string. My leader was a piece of 
gut from my brother's 'cello; my flybook, an 
old wallet. As for flies, they seemed beyond 
my means; and it was perplexing to know 
what to do, until I found a book which said 
that it was better by far to tie your own flies. 
With joyful relief I acted on this counsel. 
Plucking the feather-duster, I tied two White 
Millers with shoe-thread upon cod-hooks. 
One of these I stained and streaked with 
my heart's blood into the semblance of a 
Parmacheene Belle. The canary furnished 
materials for a Yellow May; a dooryard 
English sparrow, for a Brown Hackle. My 
masterpiece, the beautiful, parti-colored fly 
known as Jock Scott, owed its being to my 
sister's Easter bonnet. 

I covered the points of the hooks with 
pieces of cork, and fished on the front lawn 
[ 62 ] 



A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS 

from morning to night, leaning with difficulty 
against the thrust of an imaginary torrent. 
And I never ceased striving to make the three 
flies straighten out properly as the books 
directed, and fall like thistledown upon the 
strategic spot where the empty tomato can 
was anchored, and then jiggle appetizingly 
down over the four-pounder, where he 
sulked in the deep hole just beyond the 
hydrant. 

The hunting fever was wakened by the 
need for the Brown Hackle already mentioned. 
But as the choice of weapons and of victims 
culminated in the air-gun and the sparrow, 
respectively, my earliest hunting was confined 
even more closely than my fishing to the 
library and the dense and teeming forests of 
the imagination. 

But while somewhat handicapped here by 
the scarcity of ferocious game, I was more 
fortunate in another enthusiasm which at- 
tacked me at almost the same time. For 
however unpropitious the hunting is on any 
[ 63 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

given part of the earth's surface, there is 
everywhere and always an abundance of good 
hidden-treasure-seeking to be had. The gar- 
den, the attic, the tennis lawn all suffered. 
And my initiative was strengthened by the 
discovery of an incomparable book all 
about a dead man's chest, and not only 
digging for gold in a secret island, but 
finding it, too, by jingo! and fighting off 
the mutineers. 

These aspirations naturally led to games of 
Pirate, or Outlaw, which were handicapped, 
however, by the scarcity of playmates, and 
their curious hesitation to serve as victims. 
As pirates and outlaws are well known to be 
the most superstitious of creatures, inclining 
to the primitive in their religious views, we 
were naturally led into a sort of dread en- 
thusiasm for — or enthusiastic dread of — 
the whole pantheon of spooks, sprites, and 
bugaboos to which savages and children, 
great and small, bow the knee. My dreams 
at that time ran something like this: 
r 64 1 



A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS 



PARADISE REVISED 



Playing hymn-tunes day and night 

On a harp may be all right 

For the grown-ups; but for me, 

I do wish that heaven could be 

Sort o' like a circus, run 

So a kid could have some fun! 

There I 'd not play harps, but horns 
When I chased the unicorns — 
Magic tubes with pistons greasy, 
Slides that pushed and pulled out easy, 
Cylinders of snaky brass 
Where the fingers like to fuss, 
Polished like a looking-glass, 
Ending in a blunderbuss. 

I would ride a horse of steel 
Wound up with a ratchet-wheel. 
Every beast I 'd put to rout 
Like the man I read about. 
I would singe the leopard's hair, 
Stalk the vampire and the adder, 
Drive the werewolf from his lair, 
Make the mad gorilla madder. 
Needle-guns my work should do. 
But, if beasts got closer to, 
I would pierce them to the marrow 
With a barbed and poisoned arrow, 
Or I 'd whack 'em on the skull 
Till my scimiter was dull. 

[ 65 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART. 

If these weapons did n't work, 

With a kris or bowie-knife, 

Poniard, assegai, or dirk, 

I would make them beg for life; — 

Spare them, though, if they 'd be good 

And guard me from what haunts the wood 

From those creepy, shuddery sights 

That come round a fellow nights — 

Imps that squeak and trolls that prowl, 

Ghouls, the slimy devil-fowl, 

Headless goblins with lassoes, 

Scarlet witches worse than those, 

Flying dragon-fish that bellow 

So as most to scare a fellow. . . . > 

There, as nearly as I could, 

I would live like Robin Hood, 

Taking down the mean and haughty, 

Getting plunder from the naughty 

To reward all honest men 

Who should seek my outlaw's den. 

When I 'd wearied of these pleasures 
I 'd go hunt for hidden treasures — 
In no ordinary way, 
Pirates' luggers I 'd waylay; 
Board them from my sinking dory, 
Wade through decks of gore and glory, 
Drive the fiends, with blazing matchlock, 
Down below, and snap the hatch-lock. 

Next, I 'd scud beneath the sky-land, 
Sight the hills of Treasure Island, 

[ 66 ) 






A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS 

Prowl and peer and prod and prise, 
Till there burst upon my eyes 
Just the proper pirate's freight: 
Gold doubloons and pieces of eight! 

Then — the very best of all — 
Suddenly a stranger tall 
Would appear, and I 'd forget 
That we hadn't ever met. 
And with cap upthrown I 'd greet him 
(Turning from the plunder, yellow) 
And I'd hurry fast to meet him, 
For he 'd be the very fellow 
Who, I think, invented fun — 
Robert Louis Stevenson. 

The enthusiasms of this barbaric period 
never died. They grew up, instead, and 
proved serviceable friends. Fishing and hunt- 
ing are now the high-lights of vacation time. 
The crude call of the weird and the inex- 
plicable has modulated into a siren note from 
the forgotten psychic continents which we 
Western peoples have only just discovered 
and begun to explore. As for the buried 
treasure craze — why, my life-work prac- 
tically amounts to a daily search for hidden 
valuables in the cellars and attics, the 
[ 67 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

chimney-pieces and desert islands of the 
mind, and secret attempts to coin them 
into currency. 

And so I might go on to tell of my enthu- 
siasms for no end of other things like reading, 
modeling, folk-lore, cathedrals, writing, pic- 
tures, and the theater. Then there is the 
long story of that enthusiasm called Love, of 
Friendship its twin, and their elder brother, 
Religion, and their younger sister, Altruism. 
And travel and adventure and so on. But no! 
It is, I believe, a misdemeanor to obtain at- 
tention under false pretenses. If I have caught 
the reader's eye by promising to illustrate in 
outline a new method of writing autobio- 
graphy, I must not abuse his confidence by 
putting that method into practice. So, with 
a regret almost equal to that of Lewis Carroll's 
famous Bellman — 

I skip twenty years — 
and close with my latest enthusiasm. 

[ 68 ] 



A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS 

IV 

Confirmed wanderers that we were, my 
wife and I had rented a house for the winter 
in a Massachusetts coast village and had 
fallen somewhat under the spell of the place. 
Nevertheless, we had decided to move on 
soon — to try, in fact, another trip through 
Italy. Our friendly neighbors urged us to 
buy land up the "back lane" instead, and 
build and settle down. We knew nothing of 
this region, however, and scarcely heard them. 

But they were so insistent that one day we 
ventured up the back lane at dusk and began 
to explore the woods. It grew dark and we 
thought of turning back. Then it began to 
grow light again. A full moon was climbing 
up through the maples, inviting further ex- 
plorations. We pushed through a dense 
undergrowth and presently were in a grove of 
great white pines. There was a faint sound of 
running water, and suddenly we came upon an 
astonishing brook — wide, swift, and musical. 
[ 69 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

We had not suspected the existence of such 
a brook within a dozen leagues. It was over- 
arched by tall oaks and elms, beeches, tupe- 
los, and maples. The moonbeams were danc- 
ing in the ripples and on the floating castles 
of foam. 

"What a place for a study!" 

"Yes; a log cabin with a big stone fireplace." 

The remarks came idly, but our eyes met 
and held. Moved by one impulse we turned 
from the stream and remarked what bosh 
people will sometimes talk, and discussed the 
coming Italian trip as we moved cautiously 
among the briers. But when we came once 
more to the veteran pines, they seemed more 
glamorous than ever in the moonlight, es- 
pecially one that stood near a large holly, 
apart from the rest — a three-prong lyrical 
fellow — and his opposite, a burly, thickset 
archer, bending his long-bow into a most 
exquisite curve. The fragrant pine needles 
whispered. The brook lent its faint music. 

"Quick! We had better get away!" 
[ 70 1 



A CHAPTER OF ENTHUSIASMS 

A forgotten lumber road led us safe from 
briers up a hill. Out of a dense oak grove 
we suddenly emerged upon the more open 
crest. Our feet sank deep in moss. 

"Look," I said. 

Over the heads of the high forest trees 
below shimmered a mile of moonlit marshes, 
and beyond them a gleam — perhaps from 
some vessel far at sea, perhaps even from a 
Provincetown lighthouse. 

"Yes, but look!" 

At a touch I faced around and beheld, 
crowning the hill, a stately company of red 
cedars, comely and dense and mysterious as 
the cypresses of Tivoli, and gloriously drenched 
in moonlight. 

"But what a place for a house!" 

"Let's give up Italy," was the answer, 
"and make this wood our home." 

By instinct and training we were two in- 
veterate wanderers. Never had we possessed 
so much as a shingle or a spoonful of earth. 
But the nest-building enthusiasm had us at 
[ 71 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

last. Our hands met in compact. As we 
strolled reluctantly homeward to a ten- 
o'clock dinner we talked of road-making, 
swamps, pneumatic water-systems, the nim- 
bleness of dollars, and mountains of other 
difficulties. And we agreed that the only 
kind of faith which can easily remove moun- 
tains is the faith of the enthusiast. 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

HUMAN nature abhors a vacuum, espe- 
cially a vacuum inside itself. Offer the 
ordinary man a week's vacation all alone, and 
he will look as though you were offering him 
a cell in Sing Sing. 

"There are," as Ruth Cameron truly ob- 
serves, "a great many people to whom there 
is no prospect more terrifying than that of a 
few hours with only their own selves for com- 
pany. To escape that terrible catastrophe, 
they will make friends with the most fearful 
bore or read the most stupid story. ... If 
such people are marooned a few hours, not 
only without human companionship, but even 
without a book or magazine with which to 
screen their own stupidity from themselves, 
they are fairly frantic." 

If any one hates to be alone with himself, 
f 73 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

the chances are that he has not much of any 
self to be alone with. He is in as desolate a 
condition as a certain Mr. Pease of Oberlin, 
who, having lost his wife and children, set up 
his own tombstone and chiseled upon it this 
epitaph: 

"Here lies the pod. 
The Pease are shelled and gone to God." 

Now, pod-like people such as he are always 
solitary wherever other people are not; and 
there is, of course, nothing much more dis- 
tressing than solitariness. These people, 
however, fall through sheer ignorance into a 
confusion of thought. They suppose that 
solitude and solitariness are the same thing. 
To the artist in life — to the wise keeper of 
the joyful heart — there is just one difference 
between these two : it is the difference between 
heaven and its antipodes. For, to the artist 
in life, solitude is solitariness plus the Auto- 
Comrade. 

As it is the Auto-Comrade who makes all 
the difference, I shall try to describe his 
[ 74 ] 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

appearance. His eyes are the most arresting 
part of him. They never peer stupidly through 
great, thick spectacles of others' making. 
They are scarcely ever closed in sleep, and 
sometimes make their happiest discoveries 
during the small hours. These hours are 
truly small because the Auto-Comrade often 
turns his eyes into the lenses of a moving- 
picture machine — such an entertaining one 
that it compresses the hours to seconds. It is 
through constant, alert use that his eyes have 
become sharp. They can pierce through the 
rinds of the toughest personalities, and even 
penetrate on occasion into the future. They 
can also take in whole panoramas of the past 
in one sweeping look. For they are of that 
"inner" variety through which Wordsworth, 
winter after winter, used to survey his daffo- 
dil-fields. "The bliss of solitude," he called 
them. 

The Auto-Comrade has an adjustable brow. 
It can be raised high enough to hold and 
reverberate and add rich overtones to, the 
[ 75 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

grandest chords of thought ever struck by a 
Plato, a Buddha, or a Kant. The next instant 
it may easily be lowered to the point where 
the ordinary cartoon of commerce or the 
tiny cachinnation of a machine-made Ches- 
terton paradox will not ring entirely hollow. 
As for his voice, it can at times be more musi- 
cal than Melba's or Caruso's. Without being 
raised above a whisper, it can girdle the globe. 
It can barely breathe some delicious new 
melody; yet the thing will float forth not 
only undiminished, but gathering beauty, sig- 
nificance, and incisiveness in every land it 
passes through. 

The Auto-Comrade is an erect, wiry young 
figure of an athlete. As he trades at the 
Seven-League Boot and Shoe Concern, it 
never bothers him to accompany you on the 
longest tramps. His feet simply cannot be 
tired out. As for his hands, they are always 
alert to give you a lift up the rough places on 
the mountain-side. He has remarkable pres- 
ence of body. In any emergency he is usually 
[ 76 ] 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

the best man on the spot. He is at once seer, 
creator, accomplisher, and present help in 
time of trouble. But his everyday occupation 
is that of entertainer. He is the joy-bringer 
— the Prometheus of pleasure. In his vicin- 
ity there is no such thing as ennui or lone- 
someness. Emerson wrote: 

"When I would spend a lonely day 
Sun and moon are in my way." 

But for pals of the Auto-Comrade, not only 
sun, moon, etc., are in the way, but all of his 
own unlimited resources. For every time and 
season he has a fittingly varied repertory of 
entertainment. 

Now and again he startles you by the 
legerdemain feat of snatching brand-new 
ideas out of the blue, like rabbits out of a hat. 
While you stand at the port-hole of your 
cabin and watch the rollers rushing back to 
the beloved home-land you are quitting, he 
marshals your friends and acquaintances into 
a long line for a word of greeting or a rapid- 
[77] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

fire chat, just as though you were some idol 
of the people, and were steaming in past the 
Statue of Liberty on your way home from 
lionizing and being lionized abroad, and the 
Auto-Comrade were the factotum at your 
elbow who asks, "What name, please?" 

After the friends and acquaintances, he 
even brings up your betes noires and dear- 
est enemies for inspection and comment. 
Strangely enough, viewed in this way, these 
persons no longer seem so contemptible or 
pernicious or devilish as they once did. At 
this point your factotum rubs your eye-glasses 
bright with the handkerchief he always car- 
ries about for slate-cleaning purposes, and 
lo! you even begin to discover good points 
about the chaps, hitherto unsuspected. 

Then there are always your million-and-one 
favorite melodies which nobody but that all- 
around musical amateur, the Auto-Comrade, 
can so exquisitely whistle, hum, strum, fiddle, 
blat, or roar. There is also a universeful of 
new ones for him to improvise. And he is the 
[ 78 ] 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

jolliest sort of fellow musician, because, when 
you play or sing a duet with him, you can 
combine with the exciting give-and-take and 
reciprocal stimulation of the duet, the god- 
like autocracy of the solo, its opportunity 
for wide, uninterrupted, uncoerced self-ex- 
pression. Sometimes, however, in the first 
flush of escape with him to the wilds, you are 
fain to clap your hand over his mouth in 
order the better to taste the essentially folk- 
less savor of solitude. For music is a curi- 
ously social art, and Browning was more than 
half right when he said, "Who hears music, 
feels his solitude peopled at once." 

Perhaps you can find your entertainer a 
small lump of clay or modeling-wax to thumb 
into bad caricatures of those you love and 
good ones of those you hate, until increasing 
facility impels him to try and model not a 
Tanagra figurine, for that would be unlike 
his original fancy, but a Hoboken figurine, 
say, or a sketch for some Elgin (Illinois) 
marbles. 

[ 79 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

If you care anything for poetry and can 
find him a stub of pencil and an unoccupied 
cuff, he will be most completely in his element; 
for if there is any one occupation more closely 
identified with him than another, it is that 
of poet. And though all Auto-Comrades are 
not poets, all poets are Auto-Comrades. 
Every poem which has ever thrilled this world 
or another has been written by the Auto- 
Comrade of some so-called poet. This is one 
reason why the so-called poets think so much 
of their great companions. "Allons! after 
the great companions!" cried old Walt to his 
fellow poets. If he had not overtaken, and 
held fast to, his, we should never have heard 
the "Leaves of Grass" whispering "one or 
two indicative words for the future." The 
bards have always obeyed this call. And 
they have known how to value their Auto- 
Comrades, too. See, for example, what Keats 
thought of his: 

Though the most beautiful Creature were wait- 
ing for me at the end of a Journey or a Walk; 

f 80 1 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

though the Carpet were of Silk, the Curtains of 
the morning Clouds; the chairs and Sofa stuffed 
with Cygnet's down; the food Manna, the Wine 
beyond Claret, the Window opening on Winander 
mere, I should not feel — or rather my Happiness 
would not be so fine, as my Solitude is sublime. 
Then instead of what I have described, there is 
a sublimity to welcome me home — The roaring 
of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the 
window pane are my Children. ... I feel more 
and more every day, as my imagination strength- 
ens, that I do not live in this world alone but in 
a thousand worlds — No sooner am I alone than 
shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, 
and serve my Spirit the office which is equivalent 
to a King's body-guard. ... I live more out of 
England than in it. The Mountains of Tartary 
are a favorite lounge, if I happen to miss the 
Alleghany ridge, or have no whim for Savoy. 

This last sentence not only reveals the fact 
that the Auto-Comrade, equipped as he is 
with a wishing-mat, is the very best cicerone 
in the world, but also that he is the ideal 
tramping companion. Suppose you are moun- 
tain-climbing. As you start up into "na- 
ture's observatory," he kneels in the dust and 
fastens wings upon your feet. He conveniently 
f 81 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

adjusts a microscope to your hat-brim, and 
hangs about your neck an excellent telescope. 
He has enough sense, too, to keep his mouth 
closed. For, like Hazlitt, he "can see no wit 
in walking and talking." The joy of existence, 
you find, rarely tastes more cool and sweet 
and sparkling than when you and your Auto- 
Comrade make a picnic thus, swinging in a 
basket between you a real, live thought for 
lunch. On such a day you come to believe 
that Keats, on another occasion, must have 
had his own Auto-Comrade in mind when he 
remarked to his friend Solitude that 

"... it sure must be 
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind, 
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee." 

The Auto-Comrade can sit down with you 
in thick weather on a barren lighthouse rock 
and give you a breathless day by hanging 
upon the walls of fog the mellow screeds of 
old philosophies, and causing to march and 
countermarch over against them the scarlet 
and purple pageants of history. Hour by 
1 82 1 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

hour, too, he will linger with you in the 
metropolis, that breeder of the densest 
solitudes — in market or terminal, subway, 
court-room, library, or lobby — and hour by 
hour unlock you those chained books of the 
soul to which the human countenance offers 
the master key. 

Something of a sportsman, too, is the Auto- 
Comrade. He it is who makes the fabulously 
low score at golf — the kind of score, by the 
way, that is almost invariably born to blush 
unseen. And he will uncomplainingly, even 
zestfully, fish from dawn to dusk in a solitude 
so complete that there is not even a fin to 
break it. But if there are fish, he finds them. 
He knows how to make the flies float indefi- 
nitely forward through yonder narrow open- 
ing, and drop, as light as thistledown, in the 
center of the temptingly inaccessible pool. 
He knows without looking, exactly how thick 
and how prehensile are the bushes and 
branches that lie in wait for the back cast, 
and he can calculate to a grain how much 
[ 83 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

urging the reactionary three-pounder and the 
blest tie that binds him to the four-ounce rod 
will stand. 

He is one of the handiest possible persons 
to have along in the woods. When you take 
him on a canoe trip with others, and the party 
comes to "white water," he turns out to be a 
dead shot at rapid-shooting. He is sure to 
know what to do at the supreme moment 
when you jam your setting-pole immutably 
between two rocks and, with the alternative 
of taking a bath, are forced to let go and 
grab your paddle; and are then hung up on 
a slightly submerged rock at the head of the 
chief rapid just in time to see the rest of the 
party disappear majestically around the lower 
bend. At such a time, simply look to the 
Auto-Comrade. He will carry you through. 
Also there is no one like him at the moment 
when, having felled your moose, leaned your 
rifle against a tree, and bent down the better 
to examine him, the creature suddenly comes 
to life. 

[ 84 1 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

In tennis, when you wake up to find that 
your racket has just smashed a lob on the 
bounce from near the back-net, scoring a clean 
ace between your paralyzed opponents, you 
ought to know that the racket was guided by 
that superior sportsman; and if you are truly 
modest, you will admit that your miraculous 
stop wherewith the team whisked the baseball 
championship out of the fire in the fourteenth 
inning was due to his unaided efforts. 

There are other games about which he is 
not so keen: solitaire, for instance. For sol- 
itaire is a social game that soon loses its zest 
if there be not some devoted friend or relative 
sitting by and simulating that pleasureable 
absorption in the performance which you 
yourself only wish that you could feel. 

This great companion can keep you from 
being lonely even in a crowd. But there is 
a certain kind of crowd that he cannot abide. 
Beware how you try to keep him in a crowd 
of unadulterated human porcupines! You 
know how the philosopher Schopenhauer once 
[ 85 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

likened average humanity to a herd of porcu- 
pines on a cold day, who crowd stupidly to- 
gether for warmth, prick one another with 
their quills, are mutually repelled, forget the 
incident, grow cold again, and repeat the 
whole thing ad infinitum. 

In other words, the human porcupine is 
the person considered at the beginning of this 
one-sided discussion who, to escape the terri- 
ble catastrophe of confronting his own inner 
vacuum, will make friends with the most 
hideous bore. This creature, however, is 
much more rare than the misanthropic Scho- 
penhauer imagined. It takes a long time to 
find one among such folk as lumbermen, 
gypsies, shirt-waist operatives, fishermen, 
masons, trappers, sailors, tramps, and team- 
sters. If the sour philosopher had only had 
the pleasure of knowing those teamsters who 
sent him into paroxysms of rage by cracking 
their whips in the alley, I am sure that he 
would never have spoken as harshly of their 
minds as he did. The fact is that porcupines 
[ 86 ] 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

are not extremely common among the very 
"common" people. It may be that there is 
something stupefying about the airs which 
the upper classes, the best people, breathe and 
put on, but the social climber is apt to find 
the human porcupine in increasing herds as 
he scales the heights. This curious fact would 
seem incidentally to show that our misan- 
thropic philosopher must have moved ex- 
clusively in the best circles. 

Now, if there is one thing above all others 
that the Auto-Comrade cannot away with, it 
is the flaccid, indolent, stodgy brain of the 
porcupine. If people have let their minds 
slump down into porcupinishness, or have 
never taken the trouble to rescue them from 
that ignominious condition — well, the Auto- 
Comrade is no snob; when all's said, he is a 
rather democratic sort of chap. But he has to 
draw the line somewhere, you know, and he 
really must beg to be excused from rubbing 
shoulders with such intellectual rabble, for 
instance, as blocks upper Fifth Avenue on 
[87] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

Sunday noons. He prefers instead the rabble 
which, on all other noons of the week, blocks 
the lower end of that variegated thorough- 
fare. 

Such exclusiveness lays the Auto-Comrade 
open, of course, to the charge of inhospitality. 
But "is not he hospitable," asks Thoreau, 
"who entertains good thoughts?" Person- 
ally, I think he is. And I believe that this 
sort of hospitality does more to make the 
world worth living in than much conventional 
hugging to your bosom of porcupines whose 
language you do not speak, yet with whom it 
is embarrassing to keep silence. 

If the Auto-Comrade mislikes the porcu- 
pine, however, the feeling is returned with 
exorbitant interest. The alleged failings of 
auto-comradeship have always drawn grins, 
jokes, fleers, and nudges, from the auto- 
comradeless. It is time the latter should 
know that the joke is really on him; for he is 
the most forlorn of mankind. The other is 
never at a loss. He is invulnerable, being 
[ 88 ] 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

one whom "destiny may not surprise nor 
death dismay." But the porcupine is liable 
at any moment to be deserted by associates 
who are bored by his sharp, hollow quills. He 
finds himself the victim of a paradox which 
decrees that the hermit shall "find his crowds 
in solitude" and never be alone; but that the 
flocker shall every now and then be cast into 
inner darkness, where shall be "weeping and 
gnashing of teeth." 

The laugh is on the porcupine; but the 
laugh turns almost into a tear when one stops 
to realize the nature of his plight. Why, the 
poor wretch is actually obliged to be near 
someone else in order to enjoy a sense of 
vitality! In other words, he needs somebody 
else to do his living for him. He is a vicarious 
citizen of the world, holding his franchise 
only by courtesy of Tom, Dick, and Harry. 
All the same, it is rather hard to pity him 
very profoundly while he continues to feel 
quite as contemptuously superior as he usu- 
ally does. For, the contempt of the average 
[ 39 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

porcupine for pals of the Auto-Comrade is 
akin to the contempt which the knights of 
chivalry felt for those paltry beings who were 
called clerks because they possessed the queer, 
unfashionable accomplishment of being able 
to read and write. 

I remember that the loudest laugh achieved 
by a certain class-day orator at college came 
when he related how the literary guy and the 
tennis-player were walking one day in the 
woods, and the literary guy suddenly ex- 
claimed: "Ah, leave me, Louis! I would be 
alone." Even apart from the stilted language 
in which the orator clothed the thought of 
the literary guy, there is, to the porcupine, 
something irresistibly comic in such a situa- 
tion. It is to him as though the literary guy 
had stepped up to the nearest policeman and 
begged for the room at Sing Sing already 
referred to. 

Indeed, the modern porcupine is as sus- 
picious of pals of the Auto-Comrade as the 
porcupines of the past were of sorcerers and 
[ 90 ] 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

witches — folk, by the way, who probably 
consorted with spirits no more malign than 
Auto-Comrades. "What," asked the por- 
cupines of one another, "can they be doing, 
all alone there in those solitary huts? What 
honest man would live like that? Ah, they 
must be up to no good. They must be hand 
in glove with the Evil One. Well, then, away 
with them to the stake and the river!" 

As a matter of fact, it probably was not 
the Evil One that these poor folk were con- 
sorting with, but the Good One. For what is a 
man's Auto-Comrade, anyway, but his own 
soul, or the same thing by what other name 
soever he likes to call it, with which he divides 
the practical, conscious part of his brain, 
turn and turn about, share and share alike? 
And what is a man's own soul but a small 
stream of the infinite, eternal water of life? 
And what is heaven but a vast harbor where 
myriad streams of soul flow down, returning 
at last to their Source in the bliss of perfect 
reunion? I believe that many a Salem witch 
[ 91 I 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

was dragged to her death from sanctuary; for 
church is not exclusively connected with 
stained glass and collection-baskets. Church 
is also wherever you and your Auto-Comrade 
can elude the starched throng and fall together, 
if only for a moment, on your knees. 

The Auto-Comrade has much to gain by 
contrast with one's flesh-and-blood associates, 
especially if this contrast is suddenly brought 
home to one after a too long separation from 
him. I shall never forget the thrill that was 
mine early one morning after two months of 
close, uninterrupted communion with one of 
my best and dearest friends. At the very 
instant when the turn of the road cut off that 
friend's departing hand- wave, I was aware of 
a welcoming, almost boisterous shout from 
the hills of dream, and turning quickly, beheld 
my long-lost Auto-Comrade rushing eagerly 
down the slopes toward me. 

Few joys may compare with the joy of 
such a sudden unexpected reunion. It is like 
"the shadow of a mighty rock within a weary 
[ 92 ] 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

land." No, this simile is too disloyal to my 
friend. Well, then, it is like a beaker full of 
the warm South when you are leaving a good 
beer country and are trying to reconcile your- 
self to ditch-water for the next few weeks. At 
any rate, similes or not, there were we two 
together again at last. What a week of 
weeks we spent, pacing back and forth on the 
veranda of our log cabin, where we over- 
looked the pleasant sinuosities of the Sebois 
and gazed out together over golden beech 
and ghostly birch and blood-red maple ban- 
ners to the far violet mountains of the Aroos- 
took! And how we did take stock of the im- 
mediate past, chuckling to find that it had 
not been a quarter so bad as I had stupidly 
supposed. What gilded forest trails were 
those which we blazed into the glamorous 
land of to-morrow ! And every other moment 
these recreative labors would be interrupted 
while I pressed between the pages of a note- 
book some butterfly or sunset leaf or quad- 
ruply fortunate clover which my Auto-Com- 
[ 93 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

rade found and turned over to me. (Between 
two of those pages, by the way, I afterwards 
found the argument of this chapter.) 

Then, when the effervescence of our meet- 
ing had lost a little of its first, fine, carbon- 
ated sting, what Elysian hours we did spend 
over the correspondence of those other two 
friends, Goethe and Schiller! Passage after 
passage we would turn back to re-read and 
muse over. These we would discuss without 
any of the rancor or dogmatic insistence or 
one-eyed stubbornness that usually accom- 
pany the clash of mental steel on mental steel 
from a different mill. And without making 
any one else lose the thread or grow short- 
breathed or accuse us passionately of reading 
ahead, we would, on the slightest provoca- 
tion, out-Fletcher Fletcher chewing the cud 
of sweet and bitter fancy. And we would 
underline and bracket and side-line and 
overline the ragged little paper volume, and 
scribble up and down its margins, and dream 
over its footnotes, to our hearts' content. 
[ 94 ] 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

Such experiences, though, are all too rare 
with me. Why? Because my Auto-Comrade 
is a rather particular person and will not asso- 
ciate with me unless I toe his mark. 

"Come," I propose to him, "let us go a 
journey." 

"Hold hard," says he, and looks me over 
appraisingly. "You know the rule of the 
Auto-Comrades' Union. We are supposed to 
associate with none but fairly able persons. 
Are you a fairly able person?" 

If it turns out that I am not, he goes on a 
rampage, and begins to talk like an athletic 
trainer. The first thing he demands is that 
his would-be associate shall keep on hand a 
jolly good store of surplus vitality. You are 
expected to supply exuberance to him some- 
what as you supply gasolene to your motor. 
Now, of course, there are in the world not a 
few invalids and other persons of low physical 
vitality whose Auto-Comrades happen to 
have sufficient gasolene to keep them both 
running, if only on short rations. Most of 
[ 95 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

these cases, however, are pathological. They 
have hot-boxes at both ends of the machine, 
and their progress is destined all too soon to 
cease and determine disastrously. The rest 
of these cases are the rare exceptions which 
prove the rule. For unexuberant yet un- 
pathological pals of the Auto-Comrade are 
as rare as harmonious households in which 
the efforts of a devoted and blissful wife sup- 
port an able-bodied husband. 

The rule is that you have got to earn exu- 
berance for two. "Learn to eat balanced 
rations right/' thunders the Auto-Comrade, 
laying down the law; "exercise, perspire, 
breathe, bathe, sleep out of doors, and sleep 
enough; rule your liver with a rod of iron, 
don't take drugs or nervines, cure sickness 
beforehand, keep love in your heart, do an 
adult's work in the world, have at least as 
much fun as you ought to have." 

"That," he goes on, "is the way to develop 
enough physical overplus so that you will be 
enabled to overcome your present sad addic- 
[ 96 1 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

tion to mob-intoxication. And, provided your 
mind is not in as bad condition as your body, 
this physical overplus will transmute some 
of itself into mental exuberance. This will 
enable you to have more fun with your mind 
than an enthusiastic kitten has with its tail. 
It will enable you to look before and after, 
and purr over what is, as well as to discern, 
with pleasurable longing, what is not, and 
set forth confidently to capture it." 

But if, by any chance, you have allowed 
your mind to get into the sort of condition 
which the old-fashioned German scholar used 
to allow his body to get into, it develops that 
the Auto-Comrade hates a flabby brain almost 
as much as he hates a flabby body. He soon 
makes it clear that he will not have much to 
do with any one who has not yet mastered 
the vigorous and highly complex art of not 
worrying. Also, he demands of his compan- 
ion the knack of calm, consecutive thought. 
This is one reason why so many more Auto- 
Comrades are to be found in crow's-nests, 
[ 97 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

gypsy-vans, and shirt-waist factories than on 
upper Fifth Avenue. For, watching the stars 
and the sea from a swaying masthead, taking 
light-heartedly to the open road, or even 
operating a rather unwholesome sewing-ma- 
chine all day in silence, is better for consecu- 
tiveness of mind than a never-ending round of 
offices, clubs, committees, servants, dinners, 
teas, and receptions, to each of which one is 
a little late. 

In diffusing knowledge of, and enthusiasm 
for, this knack of concentration, Arnold 
Bennett's little books on mental efficiency 
have done wonders for the art of auto-com- 
radeship. Their popular persuasiveness has 
coaxed thousands on thousands of us to go 
in for a few minutes' worth of mental calis- 
thenics every day. They have actually 
cajoled us into the painful feat of glancing 
over a page of a book and then putting it 
down and trying to retrace the argument in 
memory. Or they have coaxed us to fix on 
some subject — any subject — for reflection, 
[ 98 ] 







THE AUTO-COMRADE 

and then scourge our straying minds back to 
it at every few steps of the walk to the morn- 
ing train. And we have found that the men- 
tal muscles have responded at once to this 
treatment. They have hardened under the 
exercise until being left alone has begun to 
change from confinement in the same cell 
with that worst of enemies who has the 
right to forge one's own name — into a joyful 
pleasure jaunt with a totally different person 
who, if not one's best friend, is at least to be 
counted on as a trusty, entertaining, resource- 
ful, unselfish associate — at times, perhaps, 
a little exacting — yet certainly a far more 
brilliant and generally satisfactory person 
than his companion. 

No matter what the ignorant or the envious 
may say, there is nothing really unsocial in 
a moderate indulgence in the art of auto- 
comradeship. A few weeks of it bring you 
back with a fresher, keener appreciation of 
your other friends and of humanity in general 
than you had before setting forth. In the 
[ 99 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

continuous performance of the psalm of life 
such contrasts as this of solos and choruses 
have a reciprocal advantage. 

But auto-comradeship must not be over- 
done, as it was overdone by the mediaeval 
monks. Its delights are too delicious, its 
particular vintage of the wine of experience 
too rich, for long-continued consumption. 
Consecutive thought, though it is one of man's 
greatest pleasures, is at the same time perhaps 
the most arduous labor that he can perform. 
And after a long period of it, both the Auto- 
Comrade and his companion become exhausted 
and, perforce, less comradely. 

Besides the incidental exhaustion, there is 
another reason why this beatific association 
must have its time-limit; for, unfortunately, 
one's Auto-Comrade is always of the same 
sex as one's self, and in youth, at least, if the 
presence of the complementary part of crea- 
tion is long denied, there comes a time when 
this denial surges higher and higher in sub- 
consciousness, then breaks into consciousness, 
[ 100 ] 



THE AUTO-COMRADE 

and keeps on surging until it deluges all the 
tranquillities, zests, surprises, and excite- 
ments of auto-comradeship, and makes them 
of no effect. 

This is, probably, a wise provision for the 
salvation of the human digestion. For other- 
wise, many a man, having tasted of the fruit 
of the tree of the knowledge of auto-comrade- 
ship, might thereupon be tempted to retire 
to his hermit's den hard by and endeavor to 
sustain himself for life on this food alone. 

Most of us, however, long before such ex- 
tremes have been reached, are sure to rush 
back to our kind for the simple reason that 
we are enjoying auto-comradeship so much 
that we want someone else to enjoy it with. 



VI 

VIM AND VISION 

EFFICIENCY is to-day the Hallelujah 
Chorus of industry. I know a manufac- 
turer who recently read a book on business 
management. Stop-watch in hand he then 
made an exhaustive study of his office force 
and their every action. After considering the 
tabulated results he arose, smashed all but 
one of the many office mirrors, bought modern 
typewriters, and otherwise eliminated works 
of supererogation. The sequel is that a dozen 
stenographers to-day perform the work of 
the former thirty- two. 

This sort of thing is spreading through the 
business world and beyond it in every direc- 
tion. Even the artists are studying the bear- 
ing of industrial efficiency on the arts of sculp- 
ture, music, literature, architecture, and paint- 
ing. But beyond the card catalogue and the 
[ 102 ] 



VIM AND VISION 

filing cabinet the artists find that this new 
gospel has little to offer them. Their sym- 
pathies go out, instead, to a different kind of 
efficiency. The kind that bids fair to shatter 
their old lives to bits and re-mold them 
nearer to the heart's desire is not indus- 
trial but human. For inspiration it goes 
back of the age of Brandeis to the age of 
Pericles. 

The enthusiasm for human efficiency is 
beginning to rival that for industrial effi- 
ciency. Preventive medicine, public play- 
grounds, the new health education, school 
hygiene, city planning, eugenics, housing 
reform, the child-welfare and country-life 
movements, the cult of exercise and sport — 
these all are helping to lower the death-rate 
and enrich the life-rate the world over. Health 
has fought with smoke and germs and is now 
in the air. It would be strange if the recep- 
tive nature of the artist should escape the 
benignant infection. 

There is an excellent reason why human 
[ 103 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

efficiency should appeal less to the industrial 
than to the artistic worlds. Industry has 
a new supply of human machines always 
available. Their initial cost is nothing. So 
it pays to overwork them, scrap them promptly, 
and install fresh ones. Thus it comes that the 
costly spinning machines in the Southern 
mills are exquisitely cared for, while the cheap 
little boys and girls who tie the broken 
threads are made to last an average four or 
five years. In art it is different. The artist 
knows that he is, like Swinburne's Hertha, 
at once the machine and the machinist. It 
is dawning upon him that one chief reason 
why the old Greeks scaled Parnassus so 
efficiently is that all the master-climbers got, 
and kept, their human machines in good order 
for the climb. They trained for the event as 
an Olympic athlete trains to-day for the 
Marathon. One other reason why there was 
so much record-breaking in ancient Greece is 
that the non-artists trained also, and thus, 
through their heightened sympathy and appre- 
[ 104 ] 



VIM AND VISION 

ciation of the master-climbers, became mas- 
ters by proxy. But that is another chapter. 

Why has art never again reached the Peri- 
clean plane? Chiefly because the artist 
broke training when Greece declined, and has 
never since then brought his body up to the 
former level of efficiency. 

Now, as the physiological psychologists 
assure us, the artist needs a generous overplus 
of physical vitality. The art-impulse is a 
brimming-over of the cups of mental and 
spiritual exuberance. And the best way to 
insure this mental and spiritual overplus is to 
gain the physical. The artist's first duty is 
to make his body as vim-full as possible. He 
will soon find that he is greater than he knows. 
He will discover that he has, until then, been 
walking the earth more than half a corpse. 
With joy he will come to see that living in 
a glow of health bears the same relation to 
merely not being sick that a plunge in the 
cold salt surf bears to using a tepid wash-rag 
in a hall bedroom. 

f 105 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

"All through the life of a feeble-bodied 
man, his path is lined with memory's grave- 
stones which mark the spots where noble 
enterprises perished for lack of physical vigor 
to embody them in deeds." Thus wrote the 
educator, Horace Mann. And his words 
apply with special force to the worker in 
the arts. One should bear in mind that- the 
latter is in a peculiar dilemma. His nerve- 
racking, confining, exhausting work always 
tends to enfeeble and derange his body. But 
the claims of the work are so exacting that 
it is no use for him to spare intensity. Unless 
he is doing his utmost he had better be doing 
nothing at all. And to do his utmost he must 
keep his body in that supremely fit condition 
which the work itself is always tending to 
destroy. The one lasting solution is for him 
to reduce his working time to a safe maximum 
and increase his recreation and sleeping-time 
to a safe minimum, and to train "without 
haste, without rest." 

"The first requisite to great intellectuality 
[ 106 1 



VIM AND VISION 

in a man is to be a good animal," says Maxim 
the inventor. Hamerton, in his best-known 
book, offers convincing proof that overflowing 
health is one of the first essentials of genius; 
and shows how triumphant a part it played 
in the careers of such mighty men of intel- 
lectual valor as Leonardo da Vinci, Kant, 
Wordsworth, and Sir Walter Scott. 

Is the reader still unconvinced that physical 
exuberance is necessary to the artist? Then 
let him read biography and note the para- 
lyzing effect upon the biographees, of sickness 
and half sickness and three quarter wellness. 
He will see that, as a rule, the masters have 
done their most telling and lasting work with 
the tides of physical vim at flood. For the 
genius is no Joshua. He cannot make the 
sun of the mind and the moon of the spirit 
stand still while the tides of health are ebbing 
seaward. Indeed biography should not be 
necessary to convince the fair-minded reader. 
Autobiography should answer. Just let 
him glance back over his own experience and 
[ 107 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

say whether he has not thought his deepest 
thoughts and performed his most brilliant 
deeds under the intoxication of a stimulant 
no less heady than that of exuberant health. 
There is, of course, the vexed question of 
the sickly genius. My personal belief is firm 
that, as a rule, he has won his triumphs de- 
spite bad health, and not — as some like to 
imagine — because of bad health. To this 
rule there are a few often cited exceptions. 
Now, no one can deny that there is a patho- 
logical brilliance of good cheer in the works 
of Stevenson and other tubercular artists. 
The white plague is a powerful mental stimu- 
lant. It is a double-distilled extract of base- 
less optimism. But this optimism, like that 
resulting from other stimulants, is dearly 
bought. Its shrift is too short. And let 
nobody forget that for each variety of patho- 
logical optimism and brilliance and beauty 
there are ninety and nine corresponding sorts 
of pathological pessimism and dullness and 
ugliness induced by disorders of the liver, 
[ 108 ] 



VIM AND VISION 

heart, stomach, brain, skin, and so on with- 
out end. 

The thing for artists to do is to find out 
what physical conditions make for the best 
art in the long run, and then secure these 
conditions in as short a run as possible. If 
tuberculosis makes for it, then by all means 
let those of us who are sincerely devoted to 
art be inoculated without delay. If the 
family doctor refuses to oblige, all we have to 
do is to avoid fresh air, kiss indiscriminately, 
practice a systematic neglect of colds, and 
frequent the subway during rush hours. If 
alcohol makes for the best art, let us forthwith 
be admitted to the bar — the stern judgment 
bar where each solitary drinker is arraigned. 
For it is universally admitted that in art, 
quality is more important than quantity. "If 
that powerful corrosive, alcohol, only makes 
us do a little first-class work, what matter if 
it corrode us to death immediately after- 
wards? We shall have had our day." Thus 
many a gallant soul argues. But is there not 
[ 109 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

another ideal which is as far above mere 
quality as quality is above mere quantity? 
I think there is. It is quantity of quality. 
And quantity of quality is exactly the thing 
that cannot brook the corrosiveness of power- 
ful stimulants. 

I am not satisfied, however, that stimulants 
make entirely for the fine quality of even the 
short shrift. To my ear, tubercular optimism, 
when thumped on the chest, sounds a bit 
hollow. It does not ring quite as true as 
healthy optimism because one feels in the 
long run its automatic, pathological character. 
Thus tubercular, alcoholized, and drugged 
art may often be recognized by its somewhat 
artificial, unhuman, abnormal quality. I 
believe that if the geniuses who have done 
their work under the influence of these stimu- 
lants had, instead, trained sound bodies as for 
an Olympic victory, the arts would to-day be 
the richer in quantity of quality. On this 
point George Meredith wrote a trenchant 
word in a letter to W. G. Collins: 
[ no 1 



VIM AND VISION 

I think that the notion of drinking any kind of 
alcohol as a stimulant for intellectual work can 
have entered the minds of those only who snatch 
at the former that they may conceive a fictitious 
execution of the latter. Stimulants may refresh, 
and may even temporarily comfort, the body after 
labor of brain; they do not help it — not even in 
the lighter kinds of labor. They unseat the judg- 
ment, pervert vision. Productions, cast off by 
the aid of the use of them, are but flashy, trashy 
stuff — or exhibitions of the prodigious in wildness 
or grotesque conceit, of the kind which Hoffman's 
tales give, for example; he was one of the few at 
all eminent, who wrote after drinking. 

To reinforce the opinion of the great Eng- 
lishman I cannot forbear giving that of an 
equally great American: 

Never [wrote Emerson] can any advantage be 
taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the 
world, the great calm presence of the Creator, comes 
not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. 
The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple 
soul in a clean and chaste body. . . . The poet's 
habit of living should be set on so low a key that 
the common influences should delight him. His 
cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; 
the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he 
should be tipsy with water. 

[ in i 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

In other words, the artist should keep him- 
self in a condition so fit as to need no other 
stimulant than his own exuberance. But this 
should always flow as freely as beer at a col- 
lege reunion. And there should always be 
plenty in reserve. It were well to consider 
whether there is not some connection between 
decadent art and decadent bodies. A friend 
of mine recently attended a meeting of deca- 
dent painters and reported that he could not 
find a chin or a forehead in the room. 

One reason why so many of the world's 
great since Greece have neglected to store 
up an overplus of vitality is that exercise is 
well-nigh indispensable thereto; and exercise 
has not seemed to them sufficiently dignified. 
We are indebted to the dark ages for this dull 
superstition. It was then that the monas- 
teries built gloomy granite greenhouses for 
the flower of the world's intellect, that it 
might deteriorate in the darkness and perish 
without reproducing its kind. The monastic 
system held the body a vile thing, and believed 
[ 112 ] 



VIM AND VISION 

that to develop and train it was beneath the 
dignity of the spiritually elect. So flagella- 
tion was substituted for perspiration, much 
as, in the Orient, scent is substituted for soap 
— and with no more satisfactory result. This 
false notion of dignity has since then, by keep- 
ing men out of flannels, gymnasium suits, 
running-tights, and overalls, performed prodi- 
gies in the work of blighting the flowers of 
the mind and stunting the fruit trees of the 
spirit. 

To-day, however, we are escaping from 
the old superstition. We begin to see that 
there is no complete dignity for man without 
a dignified physique; and that there is no 
physical dignity to compare with that of the 
hard-trained athlete. True, he who trains 
can hardly keep up the old-time pose of the 
grand old man or the grand young man. He 
must perforce be more human and natural. 
But this sort of grandeur is now going out of 
fashion. And its absence must show to ad- 
vantage in his work. 

[ 113 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

As a rule the true artist is a most devoted 
and self-sacrificing person. Ever since the 
piping times of Pericles he has usually been 
willing to sacrifice to the demands of his art 
most of the things he enjoys excepting poor 
health. Wife, children, friends, credit — all 
may go by the board. But his poor health 
he addresses with solemn, scriptural loyalty: 
"Whither thou goest I will go: and where 
thou lodgest I will lodge. Where thou diest, 
will I die, and there will I be buried." Not 
that he enjoys the misery incidental to poor 
health. But he most thoroughly enjoys a 
number of its causes. Sitting up too late at 
night is what he enjoys; smoking too much, 
drinking too much, yielding to the exhausting 
sway of the divine efflatus for longer hours 
at a time than he has any business to, bolting 
unbalanced meals, and so on. 

But the artist is finding out that poor health 

is the very first enjoyment which he ought to 

sacrifice; that the sacrifice is by no means as 

heroic as it appears; and that, once it is ac- 

f 114 1 



VIM AND VISION 

complished, the odds are that all the other 
things he thought he must offer up may be 
added unto him through his own increased 
efficiency. 

No doubt, all this business of regimen, of 
constant alertness and petty self-sacrifice, is 
bound to grow irksome before it settles down 
in life and becomes habitual. But what does 
a little irksomeness count — or even a great 
deal of irksomeness — as against the long, 
deep thrill of doing better than you thought 
you ever knew how — of going from strength 
to strength and creating that which will ele- 
vate and delight mankind long after the pangs 
of installing regimen are forgotten and you 
have once and for all broken training and laid 
you down to sleep over? 

The reason why great men and women are 
so often cynical about their own success is 
this: they have been so immoderate in their 
enjoyment of poor health that when the hour 
of victory comes, they lack the exuberance 
and self-restraint essential to the savoring of 
[ 115 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

achievement or of any other pleasure. I 
believe that the successful invalid is more apt 
to be cynical about his success than the 
healthy failure about his failure. The latter 
is usually an optimist. But this is a hard 
belief to substantiate. For the perfectly 
healthy failure does not grow on every bush. 

If only the physical conscientiousness of 
the Greeks had never been allowed to die out, 
the world to-day would be manifoldly a richer, 
fairer, and more inspiring place. As it is, 
we shall never be able to reckon up our losses 
in genius: in Shakespeares whose births were 
frustrated by the preventable illness or death 
of their possible parents; in Schuberts who 
sickened or died from preventable causes 
before they had delivered a note of their 
message; in Giorgiones whom a suicidally 
ignorant conduct of physical life condemned 
to have their work cheapened and curtailed. 
What overwhelming losses has art not sus- 
tained by having the ranks of its artists and 
their most creative audiences decimated by 
f 116 1 



VIM AND VISION 

the dullness of mediocre health! It is hard 
to endure the thought of what the geniuses 
of the modern world might have been able to 
accomplish if only they had lived and trained 
like athletes and been treated with a small 
part of the practical consideration and live 
sympathy which humanity bestows on a 
favorite ball-player or prize-fighter. 

To-day there is still a vast amount of super- 
stition arrayed against the truth that full- 
ness of life and not grievous necessity is the 
mother of artistic invention. Necessity is, 
of course, only the stepmother of invention. 
But men like to convince themselves that sick- 
ness and morbidity are good for the arts, 
just as they delightedly embrace the convic- 
tion, and hold it with a death-grip, that a life 
of harassing poverty and anxious preoccupa- 
tion is indispensable to the true poet. The 
circumstance that this belief runs clean 
counter to the showing of history does not 
embarrass them. Convinced against their will, 
most people are of the same opinion still. 
[ 117 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

And they enthusiastically- assault and batter 
any one who points out the truth, as I shall 
endeavor to do in chapter eight. 

Even if the ideal of physical efficiency had 
been revived as little as a century ago, how 
much our world would be the gainer! If 
Richard Wagner had only known how and 
what to eat and how to avoid catching cold 
every other month, we would not have so 
many dull, dreary places to overlook in "The 
Ring," and would, instead, have three or 
four more immortal tone-dramas than his 
colds and indigestions gave him time to write. 
One hates to think what Poe might have done 
in literature if he had taken a cure and become 
a chip of the old oaken bucket. Tuberculosis, 
they now say, is preventable. If only they 
had said so before the death of Keats! . . . 

It makes one lose patience to think how 
Schiller shut himself up in a stuffy closet of a 
room all day with his exhausting work; and 
how the sole recreation he allowed himself 
during the week was a solemn game of 
[ 118 ] 



VIM AND VISION 

Vhombre with the philosopher Schelling. And 
then he wondered why he could not get on 
with his writing and why he was forever catch- 
ing cold (einen starken Schnupferi); and why 
his head was so thick half the time that he 
couldn't do a thing with it. In his corre- 
spondence with Goethe it is exasperating to 
observe that these great poets kept so little 
reserve vim in stock that a slight change 
of temperature or humidity, or even a dark 
day, was enough to overdraw their health 
account and bankrupt their work. How 
glorious it would have been if they had only 
stored up enough exuberance to have made 
them health magnates, impervious to the 
slings and arrows of outrageous February, 
and able to snap their fingers and flourish 
inspired quills in the face of a vile March! 
In that case their published works might not, 
perhaps, have gained much in bulk, but the 
masterpieces would now surely represent a 
far larger proportion of their Sammtliche 
Werke than they do. And the second part of 
[119 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

"Faust" would not, I think, contain that 
lament about the flesh so seldom having wings 
to match those of the spirit. 

"Ach! zu des Geistes Fliigeln wird so leicht 
Kein korperlicher Fliigel sich gesellen." 

Some of the most opulent and powerful 
spirits ever seen on earth have scarcely done 
more than indicate what kind of birthrights 
they bartered away for a mess of pottage. 
Coleridge, for example, ceased to write poetry 
after thirty because, by dissipating his over- 
plus of life, he had too grievously wronged 
what he described as 

"This body that does me grievous wrong." 

After all, there are comparatively few mas- 
ters, since the glory that was Greece, who 
have not half buried their talents in the earthy 
darkness of mediocre health. When we survey 
the army of modern genius, how little of the 
sustained ring and resilience and triumphant 
immortal youth of real exuberance do we find 
there! Instead of a band of sound, alert, 
[ 120 ] 






VIM AND VISION 

well-equipped soldiers of the mind and spirit, 
behold a sorry-looking lot of stragglers pain- 
fully limping along with lack-luster eyes, or 
eyes bright with the luster of fever. And the 
people whom they serve are not entirely free 
from blame. They have neglected to fill the 
soldiers' knapsacks, or put shirts on their 
backs. As for footgear, it is the usual cam- 
paign army shoe, made of blotting paper — 
the shoe that left red marks behind it at Valley 
Forge and Gettysburg and San Juan Hill. 
I believe that a better time is coming and that 
the real renaissance of creative art is about 
to dawn. For we and our army of artists are 
now beginning to see that if the artist is com- 
pletely to fulfill his function he must be able 
to run — not alone with patience, but also 
with the brilliance born of abounding vitality 
— the race that is set before him. This dawn- 
ing belief is the greatest hope of modern art. 

It does one good to see how artists, here, 
there, and everywhere, are beginning to grow 
enthusiastic over the new-old gospel of bodily 
I 121 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

efficiency, and physically to "revive the just 
designs of Greece." The encouraging thing 
is that the true artist who once finds what an 
impulse is given his work by rigorous training, 
is never content to slump back to his former 
vegetative, death-in-life existence. His daily 
prayer has been said in a single line by a 
recent American poet: 

"Life, grant that we may live until we die." 

In every way the artist finds himself the 
gainer by cutting down his hours of work to 
the point where he never loses his reserve of 
energy. He now is beginning to take absolute 
— not merely relative — vacations, and more 
of them. For he remembers that no man's 
work — not even Rembrandt's or Beethoven's 
or Shakespeare's — is ever too good; and that 
every hour of needed rest or recreation makes 
the ensuing work better. It is being borne in 
on the artist that a health-book like Fisher's 
"Making Life Worth While" is of as much 
professional value to him as many a treatise 
[ 122 ] 



VIM AND VISION 

on the practice of his craft. Insight into the 
physiological basis of his life-work can save 
the artist, it seems, from those periods of 
black despair which he once used to employ 
in running his head against a concrete wall, 
and raging impotently because he could not 
butt through. Now, instead of laying his 
futility to a mysteriously malignant fate, or to 
the persecution of secret enemies, he is likely 
to throw over stimulants and late hours and 
take to the open road, the closed squash-court, 
and the sleeping-porch. And presently armies 
cannot withhold him from joyful, triumphant 
labor. 

The artist is finding that exuberance, this 
Open Sesame to the things that count, may 
not be won without the friendly collaboration 
of the pores; and that two birds of paradise 
may be killed with one stone (which is pre- 
cious above rubies) by giving the mind fun 
while one gives the pores occupation. Sport 
is this precious stone. There is, of course, 
something to be said for sportless exercise, 
f 123 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

It is fairly good for the artist to perform solemn 
antics in a gymnasium class, to gesture im- 
passionedly with dumb-bells, and tread the 
mill of the circular running-track. But it is 
far better for him to go in with equal energy 
for exercise which, while developing the body, 
re-creates the mind and spirit. That kind of 
exercise is best, in my opinion, which offers 
plenty of variety and humor and the excite- 
ment of competition. I mean games like 
tennis, baseball, handball, golf, lacrosse, and 
polo, and sports like swift-water canoeing 
and fly-fishing, boxing, and fencing. These 
take the mind of the artist quite away from 
its preoccupations and then restore it to them, 
unless he has taken too much of a good thing, 
with a fresh viewpoint and a zest for work. ; 
Sport is one of the chief makers of exuber- 
ance because of its purging, exhilarating, and 
constructive effects on body, mind, and spirit. 
So many contemporary artists are being con- 
verted to sport that the artistic type seems to 
be changing under our eyes. It was only yes- 
[ 124 ] 



VIM AND VISION 

terday that the worker in literature, sculpture, 
painting, or music was a sickly, morbid, 
anaemic, peculiar specimen, distrusted at sight 
by the average man, and a shining mark for 
all the cast-off wit of the world. Gilbert 
never tired of describing him in "Patience." 
He was a "foot-in-the-grave young man," or 
a " Je-ne-sais-quoi young man." He was 

"A most intense young man, 
A soulful-eyed young man. 

An ultra-poetical, superaesthetical, Out-of-the-way 
young man." 

To-day, what a change! Where is this 
young man? Most of his ilk have accom- 
panied the snows of yester-year. And a goodly 
proportion of those who make merry in their 
room are sure-eyed, well set-up, ruddy, mus- 
cular chaps, about whom the average man may 
jeer and quote slanderous doggerel only at his 
peril. But somehow or other the average 
man likes this new type better and does not 
want to jeer at him, but goes and buys his 
work instead. 

[ 125 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

Faint though distinct, one begins to hear 
the new note of exuberance spreading through 
the arts. On canvas it registers the fact that 
the painters are migrating in hordes to live 
most of the year in the open country. It 
vibrates in the sparkling tone of the new type 
of musical performer like Willeke, the 'cellist. 
Like a starter's pistol it sounds out of the writ- 
ings of hard-trained men of the hour like 
John Masefield and Alfred Noyes. One has 
only to compare the overflowing life and sanity 
of workers like these with the condition of 
the ordinary "Out-of-the-way young man" 
to see what a gulf yawns between exuberance 
and exhaustion, between absolute sanity and 
a state somewhere on the sunny side of mild 
insanity. And I believe that as yet we catch 
only a faint glimpse of the glories of the 
physical renaissance. Wait until this new 
religion of exuberance is a few generations 
older and eugenics has said her say ! 

Curiously enough, the decadent artists who 
pride themselves on their extreme modernity 
[ 126 ] 



VIM AND VISION 

are the ones who now seem to cling with the 
most reactionary grip to the old-fashioned, 
invertebrate type of physique. The rest are 
in a fair way to undergo such a change as 
came to Queed, the sedentary hero of Mr. 
Harrison's novel, when he took up boxing. As 
sport and the artists come closer together, 
they should have a good effect on one another. 
The artists will doubtless make sport more 
formful, rhythmical, and beautiful. Sport, 
on the other hand, ought before long to 
influence the arts by making sportsmen of 
the artists. 

Now good sportsmanship is composed of 
fairness, team-work, the grace of a good loser, 
the grace of a good winner, modesty, and 
gameness. The first two of these amount to 
an equitable passion for a fair field and no 
favor, and a willingness to subordinate star- 
play, or personal gain, to team-play, or com- 
munal gain. Together they imply a feeling 
for true democracy. To be converted to the 
religion of sportsmanship means to become 
[ 127 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

more socially minded. I think it is more than 
a coincidence' that at the moment when the 
artists are turning to sport, their work is 
taking on the brotherly tone of democracy. 
The call of brotherhood is to-day one of the 
chief preoccupations of poetry, the drama, 
ideal sculpture, and mural decoration. For 
this rapid change I should not wonder if the 
democracy of sportsmanship were in part 
responsible. 

The third element of sportsmanship is the 
grace of a good loser. Artists to-day are 
better losers than were the " f oot-in-the-grave 
young men." Among them one now finds 
less and less childish petulance, outspoken 
jealousy of others' success, and apology for 
their own failure. Some of this has been 
shamed out of them by discovering that the 
good sportsman never apologizes or explains 
away his defeat. And they are importing 
these manly tactics into the game of art. It 
has not taken them long to see how ridiculous 
an athlete makes himself who hides behind 
[ 128 1 



VIM AND VISION 

the excuse of sickness or lack of training. 
They are impressed by the way in which the 
non-apologetic spirit is invading the less 
athletic games, even down to such a sedentary 
affair as chess. This remarkable rule, for 
example, was proposed in the recent chess 
match between Lasker and Capablanca: 

Illness shall not interfere with the playing of 
any game, on the ground that it is the business of 
the players so to train themselves that their 
bodies shall be in perfect condition; and it is their 
duty, which by this rule is enforced, to study their 
health and live accordingly. 

The fourth factor of sportsmanship is the 
grace of a good winner. It would seem as 
though the artist were learning not only to 
keep from gloating over his vanquished rival, 
but also to be generous and minimize his 
own victory. In Gilbert's day the failure did 
all the apologizing. To-day less apologizing 
is done by the failure and more by the success. 
The master in art is learning modesty, and 
from whom but the master in sport? There 
[ 129 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

are in the arts to-day fewer megalomaniacs 
and persons afflicted with delusions of gran- 
deur than there were among the "Je-ne-sais- 
quoi young men." Sport has made them more 
normal spiritually, while making them more 
normal physically. It has kept them younger. 
Old age has been attacked and driven back 
all along the line. One reason why we no 
longer have so many grand old men is that 
we no longer have so many old men. In- 
stead we have numbers of octogenarian 
sportsmen like the late Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, 
who have not yet been caught by the arch- 
reactionary fossil-collector, Senility. This is 
a fair omen for the future of progress. "If 
only the leaders of the world's thought and 
emotion," writes Bourne in "Youth," "can, 
by caring for the physical basis, keep them- 
selves young, why, the world will go far to 
catching up with itself and becoming con- 
temporaneous." 

Gameness is the final factor of good sports- 
manship. In the matter of gameness, I grant 
[ 130 ] 



VIM AND VISION 

that sport has little to teach the successful 
artist. For it takes courage, dogged persist- 
ence, resiliency — in short, the never-say-die 
spirit to succeed in any of the arts. It takes 
the Browning spirit of those who 

"fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake." 

It takes the typical Anglo-Saxon gameness of 
Johnny Armstrong of the old ballad: 

"Said John, 'Fight on, my merry men all. 
I am a little hurt, but I am not slain; 
I will lay me down for to bleed a while, 
And then I'll rise and fight with you again.'" 

Yes, but what of the weaker brothers and 
sisters in art who have not yet succeeded — 
perhaps for want of these very qualities? 
I believe that a newly developed spirit of 
sportsmanship, acting upon a newly devel- 
oped body, will presently bring to many a dis- 
heartened struggler just that increment of 
resilient gameness which will mean success 
instead of failure. 

Thus, while our artists show a tendency to 
hark back to the Greek physical ideal, they 
F 131 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

are not harking backward but forward when 
they yield to the mental and spiritual influ- 
ences of sportsmanship. For this spirit was 
unknown to the ancient world. Until yester- 
day art and sportsmanship never met. But 
now that they are mating I am confident that 
there will come of this union sons and daugh- 
ters who shall joyfully obey the summons 
that is still ringing down to us over the 
heads of the anaemic contemporaries of the 
exuberant old sportsman, Walt Whitman : 

"Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! 
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, 
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, 

greater than before known, 
Arouse! for you must justify me." 



VII 

PRINTED JOY 

The old joy which makes us more debtors to poetry than any- 
thing else in life. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

AMERICA is trying to emerge from the 
awkward age. Its body is full-grown. 
Its spirit is still crude with a juvenile crudity. 
What does this spirit need? Next to contact 
with true religion, it most needs contact with 
true poetry. It needs to absorb the grace, 
the wisdom, the idealistic beauty of the art, 
and thrill in rhyme with poetry's profound, 
spiritual insights. 

The promising thing is that America is 
beginning to do exactly this to-day. The 
entire history of our enjoyment of poetry 
might be summed up in that curious symbol 
which appears over the letter n in the word 
"canon." A rise, a fall, a rise. Here is the 
whole story of the American poetry-lover. 
[ 133 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

His enthusiasm first reached a high point 
about the middle of the nineteenth century. 
A generation later it fell into a swift decline. 
But three or four years ago it began to revive 
so rapidly that a poetry-lover's renaissance 
is now a reality. This renaissance has not 
yet been explained, although the majority 
of readers and writers feel able to tell why 
poetry declined. Let us glance at a few of 
the more popular explanations. 

Many say that poetry declined in America 
because we turned ourselves into a nation of 
entirely prosaic materialists. But if this is 
true, how do they explain our present national 
solicitude for song-birds and waterfalls, for 
groves of ancient trees, national parks, and 
city-planning? How do they explain the fact 
that our annual expenditure on the art of 
music is six times that of Germany, the 
Fatherland of Tone? And how do they ac- 
count for the flourishing condition of some of 
our other arts? If we are hopelessly material- 
istic, why should American painters and sculp- 
[ 134 ] 






PRINTED JOY 

tors have such a high world-standing? And 
why should their strongest, most original, 
most significant work be precisely in the sphere 
of poetic, suggestive landscape, and ideal 
sculpture? The answer is self-evident. It 
is no utterly prosaic age, and people that 
founded our superb orchestras, that produced 
and supported Winslow Homer, Tryon, and 
Woodbury, French, Barnard, and Saint Gau- 
dens. A more poetic hand than Wall Street's 
built St. Thomas's and the cathedral, ter- 
minals and towers of New York, Trinity 
Church in Boston, the Minnesota State 
Capitol, Bar Harbor's Building of Arts, 
West Point, and Princeton University. It is 
plain that our poetic decline was not wholly 
due to materialism. 

Other philosophers are sure that whatever 
was the matter with poetry was the fault of 
the poets themselves. Popular interest slack- 
ened, they say, because the art first degen- 
erated. Now an obvious answer to this is 
that no matter how dead the living poets of 
[ 135 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

any age become, men may always turn, if 
they will, to those dead poets of old who live 
forever on their shelves. But let us grant for 
the sake of argument that any decline of 
contemporary poets is bound to effect poetry- 
lovers in some mysteriously disastrous way. 
And let us recall the situation back there in 
the seventies when the ebb of poetic appre- 
ciation first set in. At that time Whittier, 
Holmes, Emerson, and Whitman had only 
just topped the crest of the hill of accom- 
plishment, and the last-named was as yet no 
more generally known than was the rare 
genius of the young Lanier. Longfellow, who 
remains even to-day the most popular of our 
poets, was still in full swing. Lowell was in 
his prime. Thus it appears that public appre- 
ciation, and not creative power, was the first 
to trip and topple down the slopes of the Par- 
nassian hill. Not until then did the poet come 
"tumbling after." 

Moreover, in the light of modern aesthetic 
psychology, this seems the more natural order 
[ 136 ]. 



PRINTED JOY 

of events. It takes two to make a work of 
art: one to produce, one to appreciate. The 
creative appreciator is a correlative of all 
artistic expression. It is almost impossible 
for the artist to accomplish anything amid 
the destructive atmosphere exhaled by the 
ignorant, the stupid, the indifferent, the cal- 
lous, or the actively hostile. It follows that 
the demand for poetry is created no more 
by the supply than the supply is created by 
the demand. Thus the general indifference 
to this one department of American art was 
not primarily caused by the degenerating 
supply. 

The decline and fall of our poetic empire 
have yet other Gibbons who say that our 
civilization suddenly changed from the coun- 
try to the urban type, and that our love 
of poetry began to disappear simultaneously 
with the general exodus from the country- 
side and the mushroom growth of the large 
cities. So far I agree; but not with their rea- 
son. For they say that poetry declined be- 
[ 137 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

cause cities are such dreadfully unpoetic 
things; because they have become synony- 
mous only with riveting-machines and the kind 
of building that the Germans call the "heaven- 
scratcher," with elevated railways, "sand 
hogs," whirring factories, and alleys reeking 
with the so-called "dregs" of Europe. They 
claim that the new and hopelessly vulgar 
creed of the modern city is epitomized by 
such things as a certain signboard in New 
York, which offers a typically neo-urban solu- 
tion of the old problem, "What is art?" 



PARAGON PANTS 
ARE ART 



the board declares. And this, they say, is 
about as poetic as a large city ever becomes. 

Now let us glance for a moment at the 
poems in prose and verse of Mr. James 
Oppenheim, a young man for whom a me- 
tropolis is almost completely epitomized by 
\ 138 1 



PRINTED JOY 

the riveting-machine, the sweat-shop, and the 
slum. There we discover that this poet's 
vision has pierced straight through the city's 
veneer of ugly commonplace to the beauty 
shimmering beneath. In his eyes the sinewy, 
heroic forms of the builders, clinging high 
on their frail scaffoldings and nonchalantly 
hurling red-hot rivets through space, are 
so many young gods at play with elemental 
forces. The sweat-shop is transmuted into as 
grim and glorious a battlefield as any Tours 
or Gettysburg of them all. And the dingy, 
battered old "L" train, as it clatters through 
the East Side early on "morose, gray Monday 
morning," becomes a divine chariot 

"winging through Deeps of the Lord with its eighty 
Earth-anchored Souls." 

Oh, yes; there is "God's plenty" of poetry 
in these sights and sounds, if only one looks 
deep enough to discover the beauty of home- 
liness. But there is even more of beauty and 
poetic inspiration to be drawn from the city 
[ 139 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

by him who, instead of thus straitly con- 
fining his gaze to any one aspect of urban 
life, is able to see it steadily and see it 
whole, with its subtle nuances and its over- 
powering dramatic contrasts — as a twen- 
tieth-century Walt Whitman, for example, 
might see it if he had a dash of Tennyson's 
technical equipment, of Arnold's sculpturesque 
polish and restraint, of Lanier's instinct for 
sensuous beauty. What "songs greater than 
before known" might such a poet not sing as 
he wandered close to precious records of the 
Anglo-Saxon culture of the race amid the 
stately colonial peace and simplicity of St. 
Mark's church-yard, with the vividly colored 
life of all southeastern Europe surging about 
that slender iron fence — children of the 
blood of Chopin and Tschaikowsky; of Gut- 
enberg, Kossuth, and Napoleon; of Isaiah 
and Plato, Leonardo and Dante — with the 
wild strains of the gypsy orchestra floating 
across Second Avenue, and to the southward 
a glimpse aloft in a rarer, purer air of builders 
[ 140 ] 



PRINTED JOY 

K 

clambering on the cupola of a neighboring 
Giotto's tower built of steel? Who dares say 
that the city is unpoetic? It is one of the 
most poetic places on earth. 

These, then, are the chief explanations 
which have been offered us to-day of the 
historic decline of the American poetry-lover. 
We weigh them, and find them wanting. 
Why? Because they have sought, like radio- 
graphers, far beneath the surface; whereas the 
real trouble has been only skin deep. I shall 
try to show the nature of this trouble; and 
how, by beginning to cure it, we have already 
brought on a poetic renaissance. 

Most of us who care for poetry frequently 
have one experience in common. During our 
summer vacations in the country we suddenly 
re-discover the well-thumbed "Golden Treas- 
ury" of Palgrave, and the "Oxford Book of 
Verse" which have been so unaccountably 
neglected during the city winter. We wander 
farther into the poetic fields and revel in Keats 
and Shakespeare. We may even attempt once 
[ 141 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

more to get beyond the first book of the 
"Faerie Queene," or fumble again at the 
combination lock which seems to guard the 
meaning of the second part of "Faust." And 
we find these occupations so invigorating and 
joyful that we model and cast an iron resolu- 
tion to the effect that this winter, whatever 
betide, we will read a little poetry every day, 
or every week, as the case may be. On that 
we plunge back into the beautiful, poetic, 
inspiring city, and adhere to our poetry- 
reading program — for exactly a fortnight. 
Then, unaccountably, our resolve begins to 
slacken. We cannot seem to settle our minds 
to ordered rhythms "where more is meant 
than meets the ear." Our resolve collapses. 
Once again Palgrave is covered with dust. 
But vacation time returns. After a few days 
in green pastures and beside still waters the 
soul suddenly turns like a homing-pigeon to 
poetry. And the old, perplexing cycle begins 
anew. 

A popular magazine once sent a certain 
[ 142 ] 



PRINTED JOY 

young writer and ardent amateur of poetry on 
a long journey through the Middle West. 
He took but one book in his bag. It was by 
Whitman (the poet of cities, mark). And he 
determined to read it every evening in his 
bedroom after the toils of the day. The first 
part of the trip ran in the country. "Afoot 
and light-hearted" he took to the open road 
every morning, and reveled every evening in 
such things as "Manahatta," "The Song of 
Joys," and " Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Then 
he carried his poet of cities to a city. But 
the two would have nothing to do with one 
another. And to the traveler's perplexity, 
a place no larger than Columbus, Ohio, put 
a violent end to poetry on that trip. 

In our day most poetry-lovers have had 
such experiences. These have been hard to 
explain, however, only because their cause has 
been probed for too profoundly. The chief 
cause of the decline of poetry was not spiritual 
but physical. Cities are not unpoetic in spirit. 
It is only in the physical sense that Emerson's 
F 143 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

warning is true: "If thou fill thy brain with 
Boston and New York . . . thou shalt find 
no radiance of meaning in the lonely wastes 
of the pine woods." The trouble was this: 
that the modern type of city, when it started 
into being, back in the seventies, began to take 
from men, and to use up, that margin of 
nervous energy, that exuberant overplus of 
vitality of which so much has already been 
said in this book, and which is always needed 
for the true appreciation of poetry. Grant 
Allen has shown that man, when he is con- 
scious of a superfluity of sheer physical 
strength, gives himself to play; and in like 
manner, when he is conscious of a superfluity 
of receptive power, which has a physical basis, 
he gives himself to art. 

Now, though all of the arts demand of 
their appreciators this overplus of nervous 
energy (and Heaven knows perfectly well how 
inadequate a supply is offered up to music 
and the arts of design!), yet the appreciation 
of poetry above that of the sister arts demands 
[ 144 ] 



PRINTED JOY 

this bloom on the cheek of existence. For 
poetry, with quite as much of emotional 
demand as the others, combines a consider- 
ably greater and more persistent intellectual 
demand, involving an unusual amount of 
physical wear and tear. Hence, in an era of 
overstrain, poetry is the first of the arts to 
suffer. 

Most lovers of poetry must realize, when 
they come to consider it, that their pleasure 
in verse rises and falls, like the column of 
mercury in a barometer, with the varying 
levels of their physical overplus. Physical 
overplus, however, is the thing which life in a 
modern city is best calculated to keep down. 

Surely it was no mere coincidence that, 
back there in the seventies, just at the edge 
of the poetic decline, city life began to grow 
so immoderately in volume and to be "speeded 
up" and "noised up" so abruptly that it took 
our bodies by surprise. This process has kept 
on so furiously that the bodies of most of us 
have never been able to catch up. No large 
[ 145 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

number have yet succeeded in readjusting 
themselves completely to the new pace of 
the city. And this continues to exact from 
most of us more nervous energy than any life 
may, which would keep us at our best. Hence, 
until we have succeeded either in accomplish- 
ing the readjustment, or in spending more 
time in the country, the appreciation of poetry 
has continued to suffer. 

Even in the country, it is, of course, per- 
fectly true that life spins faster now than it 
used to — what with telephones and inter- 
urban trolleys, the motor, and the R.F.D. 
But this rural progress has arrived with no 
such stunning abruptness as to outdistance 
our powers of readjustment. When we go 
from city to country we recede to a rate of 
living with which our nervous systems can 
comfortably fall in, and still control for the 
use of the mind and spirit a margin of that 
delicious vital bloom which resembles the 
ring of the overtones in some beautiful voice. 

But how is it practicable to keep this 
[ 146 J 



PRINTED JOY 

margin in the city, when the roar of noisy 
traffic over noisy pavements, the shrieks 
of newsboy and peddler, the all-pervading 
chronic excitement, the universal obligation 
to "step lively," even at a funeral, are every 
instant laying waste our conscious or uncon- 
scious powers? How are we to give the life 
of the spirit its due of poetry when our pre- 
cious margin is forever leaking away through 
lowered vitality and even sickness due to 
lack of sleep, unhygienic surroundings, con- 
stant interruption (or the expectation thereof), 
and the impossibility of relaxation owing to 
the never-ending excitement and interest and 
sexual stimulus of the great human pageant 
— its beauty and suggestiveness? 

Apart from the general destruction of the . 
margin of energy, one special thing that the 
new form of city life does to injure poetry 
is to keep uppermost in men's consciousness 
a feverish sense of the importance of the pres- 
ent moment. We might call this sense the 
journalistic spirit of the city. How many 
[ 147 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

typical metropolitans one knows who are 
forever in a small flutter of excitement over 
whatever is just happening, like a cub reporter 
on the way to his first fire, or a neuraesthete 
— if one may coin a word — who perceives 
a spider on her collarette. This habit of 
mind soon grows stereotyped, and is, of course, 
immensely stimulated by the multitudinous 
editions of our innumerable newspapers. The 
city gets one to living so intensely in the pres- 
ent minute, and often in the very most sen- 
sational second of that minute, that one grows 
impatient of the "olds," and comes to regard 
a constantly renewed and increased dose of 
"news" as the only present help in a chronic 
time of trouble. This is a kind of mental 
drug-habit. And its origin is physical. It 
is a morbid condition induced by the over- 
paced life of cities. 

Long before the rise of the modern city — 

indeed, more than a century ago — Goethe, 

who was considerably more than a century 

ahead of his age, wrote to Schiller from Frank- 

[ 148 ] 



PRINTED JOY 

fort of the journalistic spirit of cities and its 
relation to poetry: 

It seems to me very remarkable how things 
stand with the people of a large city. They live 
in a constant delirium of getting and consuming, 
and the thing we call atmosphere can neither be 
brought to their attention nor communicated to 
them. All recreations, even the theater, must 
be mere distractions; and the great weakness of 
the reading public for newspapers and romances 
comes just from the fact that the former always, 
and the latter generally, brings distraction into 
the distraction. Indeed, I believe that I have 
noticed a sort of dislike of poetic productions — or 
at least in so far as they are poetic — which seems 
to me to follow quite naturally from these very 
causes. Poetry requires, yes, it absolutely com- 
mands, concentration. It isolates man against 
his own will. It forces itself upon him again and 
again; and is as uncomfortable a possession as a 
too constant mistress. 

If this reporter's attitude of mind wsls so 
rampant in cultivated urban Germany a cen- 
tury ago as to induce "a sort of dislike of 
poetic productions," what sort of dislike of 
them must it not be inducing to-day? For 
the appreciation of poetry cannot live under 
[ 149 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

the same roof with the journalistic spirit. 
The art needs long, quiet vistas backward 
and forward, such as are to be had daily on 
one of those "lone heaths" where Hazlitt 
used to love to stalk ideas, but such as are not 
to be met with in Times Square or the Subway. 

The joyful side of the situation is that this 
need is being met. A few years ago the city 
dwellers of America began to return to nature. 
The movement spread until every one who 
could afford it, habitually fled from the city 
for as long a summer outing as possible. 
More and more people learned the delightful 
sport of turning an abandoned farm into a 
year-round country estate. The man who 
was tied to a city office formed the commuting 
habit, thus keeping his wife and children per- 
manently away from the wear and tear of 
town. The suburban area was immensely 
increased by the rapid spread of motoring. 

Thus, it was recently made possible for 
hundreds of thousands of Americans to live, 
at least a considerable part of the year, where 
[ 150 ] 






PRINTED JOY 

they could hoard up an overplus of vitality. 
The result was that these well-vitalized per- 
sons, whenever they returned to the city, 
were better able to stand — and adjust them- 
selves to — the severe urban pace, than were 
the fagged city people. It was largely by 
the impact of this new vitality that the city 
was roused to the importance of physical 
efficiency, so that it went in for parks, gym- 
nasia, baths, health and welfare campaigns, 
athletic fields, playgrounds, Boy Scouts, 
Campfire Girls, and the like. 

There are signs everywhere that we Ameri- 
cans have, by wise living, begun to win back 
the exuberance which we lost at the rise of 
the modern city. One of the surest indications 
of this is the fact that the nation has suddenly 
begun to read poetry again, very much as 
the exhausted poetry-lover instinctively turns 
again to his Palgrave during the third week 
of vacation. In returning to neglected nature 
we are returning to the most neglected of the 
arts. The renaissance of poetry is here, 
r 151 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

And men like Masefield, Noyes, and Tagore 
begin to vie in popularity with the moderately 
popular novelists. Moreover this is only the 
beginning. Aviation has come and is remind- 
ing us of the ancient prophecy of H. G. Wells 
that the suburbs of a city like New York will 
now soon extend from Washington to Albany. 
Urban centers are being diffused fast; but 
social-mindedness is being diffused faster. 
Men are wishing more and more to share with 
each brother man the brimming cup of life. 
Aircraft and true democracy are on the way 
to bear all to the land of perpetual exuber- 
ance. And on their wings the poet will again 
mount to that height of authority and esteem 
from which, in the healthful, athletic days of 
old, Homer and Sophocles dominated the 
minds and spirits of their fellow-men. That 
is to say — he will mount if we let him. In 
the following chapter I shall endeavor to show 
why the American poet has as yet scarcely 
begun to share in the poetry-renaissance. 



VIII 

THE JOYFUL HEART FOR POETS 

Nothing probably is more dangerous for the human race than 
science without poetry, civilization without culture. 

Houston Stewabt Chamberlain. 

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a 
joke. Max Eastman. 

IN the last two chapters we have seen the 
contemporary master of various arts, and 
the reader of poetry, engaged in cultivating 
the joyful heart. But there is one artist who 
has not yet been permitted to join in this 
agreable pastime. He is the American poet. 
And as his inclusion would be an even more 
joyful thing for his land than for himself, this 
book may not ignore him. 

The American poet has not yet begun to 
keep pace with the poetry-lovers' renaissance. 
He is no very arresting figure; and therefore 
you, reader, are already considering a skip to 
chapter nine. Well, if you are no more inter- 
[ 153 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

ested in him or his possibilities than is the 
average American consumer of British poetry 

— I counsel you by all means to skip in 
peace. But if you are one of the few who 
discern the promise of a vast power latent in 
the American poet, and would gladly help in 
releasing this power for the good of the race, 
I can show you what is the matter with him 
and what to do about it. 

Why has the present renaissance of the 
poetry-lover not brought with it a renais- 
sance of the American poet? Almost every 
reason but the true one has been given. 
The true reason is that our poets are tired. 
They became exhausted a couple of genera- 
tions ago; and we have kept them in this con- 
dition ever since. In the previous chapter 
we saw how city life began abruptly to be 
speeded up in the seventies. At that time the 
poet — like almost every one else in the city 

— was unable to readjust his body at once to 
the new pace. He was like a six-day bicycle 
racer who should be lapped in a sudden and 

[ 154 ] 



FOR POETS 

continued sprint. That sprint is still going on. 
Never again has the American poet felt the 
abounding energy with which he began. And 
never has he overtaken the leaders. 

The reason why the poet is tired is that he 
lives in the over-paced city. The reason why 
he lives in the city is that he is chained to it 
by the nature of his hack-work. And the 
reason for the hack-work is that the poet is 
the only one of all the artists whose art almost 
never offers him a living. He alone is forced 
to earn in other ways the luxury of perform- 
ing his appointed task in the world. For, as 
Goethe once observed, "people are so used to 
regarding poetic talent as a free gift of the 
gods that they think the poet should be as 
free-handed with the public as the gods have 
been with him." 

The poet is tired. Great art, however, is 
not the product of exhaustion, but of exuber- 
ance. It will have none of the skimmed 
milk of mere existence. Nothing less than the 
thick, pure cream of abounding vitality will 
[ 155 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

do. The exhausted artist has but three courses 
open to him: either to stimulate himself into 
a counterfeit, and suicidally brief, exuber- 
ance; or to relapse into mediocrity; or to gain 
a healthy fullness of life. 

In the previous chapter it was shown why 
poetry demands more imperatively than any 
other art, that the appreciator shall bring to 
it a margin of vitality. For a like reason 
poetry makes this same inordinate demand 
upon its maker. It insists that he shall keep 
himself even more keenly alive than the maker 
of music or sculpture, painting or architec- 
ture. This is the reason why, in the present 
era of overstrain, the poet's art has been so 
swift to succumb and so slow to recuperate. 

The poet who is obliged to live in the city 
has not yet been able to readjust his body to 
the pace of modern urban life, so that he may 
live among its never-ending conscious and 
unconscious stimulations and still keep on 
hand a triumphant reserve of vitality to pour 
into his poems. Under these new and strenu- 
[ 156 ] 



FOR POETS 

ous conditions, very little real poetry has 
been written in our cities. American poets, 
despite their genuine love of town and their 
struggles to produce worthy lines amid its 
turmoil, have almost invariably done the 
best of their actually creative work during 
the random moments that could be snatched 
in wood and meadow, by weedy marsh or 
rocky headland. To his friends it was touch- 
ing to see with what wistfulness Richard 
Watson Gilder used to seek his farm at Tyring- 
ham for a day or two of poetry after a fort- 
night of furious office life. Even Walt Whit- 
man — poet of cities that he was — had to 
retire "precipitate" from his beloved Mana- 
hatta in order fitly to celebrate her perfec- 
tions. In fact, Stedman was perhaps the 
only one of our more important singers at 
the close of the century who could do his best 
work in defiance of Emerson's injunction to 
the poet: "Thou shalt lie close hid with 
Nature, and canst not be afforded to the 
Capitol or the Exchange." But it is pleas- 
[ 157 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

ant to recall how even that poetic banker 
brightened up and let his soul expand in the 
peace of the country. 

One reason for the rapidly growing prepon- 
derance of women — and especially of un- 
married women — among our poetic leaders 
is, I think, to be found in the fact that 
women, more often than men, command the 
means of living for a generous portion of the 
year that vital, unstrenuous, contemplative 
existence demanded by poetry as an ante- 
cedent condition of its creation. It is a 
significant fact that, according to Arnold 
Bennett, nearly all of the foremost English 
writers live far from the town. Most of the 
more promising American poets of both sexes, 
however, have of late had little enough to 
do with the country. And the result is that 
the supreme songs of the twentieth century 
have remained unsung, to eat out the hearts 
of their potential singers. For fate has 
thrown most of our poets quite on their own 
resources, so that they have been obliged to 
[ 158 1 



FOR POETS 

live in the large cities, supporting life within 
the various kinds of hack-harness into which 
the uncommercially shaped withers of Peg- 
asus can be forced. Such harness, I mean, as 
journalism, editing, compiling, reading for 
publishers, hack-article writing, and so on. 
Fate has also seen to it that the poet's make-up 
is seldom conspicuous by reason of a bull- 
neck, pugilistic limbs, and the nervous equi- 
poise of a dray-horse. What he may lack in 
strength, however, he is apt to make up in 
hectic ambition. Thus it often happens that 
when the city does not consume quite all of 
his available energy, the poet, with his prob- 
ably inadequate physique, chafes against the 
hack-work and yields to the call of the luring 
creative ideas that constantly beset him. 
Then, after yielding, he chafes again, and 
more bitterly, at his faint, imperfect expres- 
sion of these dreams, recognizing in despair 
that he has been creating a mere crude by- 
product of the strenuous life about him. So 
he burns the torch of life at both ends, and 
[ 159 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

the superhuman speed of modern existence 
eats it through in the middle. Then suddenly 
the light fails altogether. 

Those poets alone who have unusual physi- 
cal endurance are able to do even a small 
amount of steady, fine-grained work in the 
city. The rest are as effectually (Jebarred 
from it as factory children are debarred from 
learning the violin well at the fag end of their 
days of toil. In her autobiography Miss 
Jane Addams speaks some luminous words 
about the state of society which forces finely 
organized artistic talent into the wearing 
struggle for mere existence. She refers to it 
as "one of the haunting problems of life; why 
do we permit the waste of this most precious 
human faculty, this consummate possession 
of all civilization? When we fail to provide 
the vessel in which it may be treasured, it 
runs out upon the ground and is irretrievably 
lost." 

I wonder if we have ever stopped to ask 
ourselves why so many of our more recent 

r i6o l 



FOR POETS 

poets have died young. Was it the hand of 
God, or the effort to do the work of two in a 
hostile environment, that struck down before 
their prime such spirits as Sidney Lanier, 
Edward Rowland Sill, Frederic Lawrence 
Knowles, Arthur Upson, Richard Hovey, 
William Vaughn Moody, and the like? These 
were poets whom we bound to the strenuous 
city, or at least to hack-work which sapped 
over-much of their vitality. An old popular 
fallacy keeps insisting that genius "will out." 
This is true, but only in a sadder sense than 
the stupidly proverbial one. As a matter of 
fact, the light of genius is all too easily blown 
out and trampled out by a blind and deaf 
world. But we of America are loath to admit 
this. And if we do not think of genius as an 
unquenchable flame, we are apt to think of it 
as an amazingly hardy plant, more tough than 
horse-brier or cactus. Only a few of us have 
yet begun to realize that the flower of genius 
is not the flower of an indestructible weed, but 
of a fastidious exotic, which usually demands 
[ 161 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

good conditions for bare existence, and needs 
a really excellent environment and constant 
tending if it is to thrive and produce the finest 
possible blooms. Mankind has usually shown 
enormous solicitude lest the man of genius be 
insufficiently supplied with that trouble and 
sorrow which is supposed to be quite indis- 
pensable to his best work. But here and there 
the thinkers are beginning to realize that the 
irritable, impulsive, impractical nature of the 
genius, in even the most favorable environ- 
ment, is formed for trouble "as the sparks to 
fly upward." They see that fortune has 
slain its hundreds of geniuses, but trouble its 
ten thousands. And they conclude that their 
own real solicitude should be, not lest the 
genius have too little adversity to contend 
with, but lest he have too much. 

We have heard not a little about the con- 
servation of land, ore, wood, and water. The 
poetry problem concerns itself with an older 
sort of conservation about which we heard 
much even as youngsters in college. I mean 
[ 162 ] 



FOR POETS 

the conservation of energy. Our poetry will 
never emerge from the dusk until either the 
bodies of our city-prisoned poets manage to 
overtake the speeding-up process and read- 
just themselves to it — or until we allow them 
an opportunity to return for an appreciable 
part of every year to the country — the place 
where the poet belongs. 

It is true that the masters of the other 
arts have not fared any too well at our hands; 
but they do not need help as badly by far 
as the poets need it. What with commis- 
sions and sales, scholarships, fellowships, and 
substantial prizes, the painters and sculptors 
and architects and even the musicians have, 
broadly speaking, been able to learn and prac- 
tise their art in that peace and security which 
is well-nigh essential to all artistic appren- 
ticeship and productive mastery. They have 
usually been able to spend more of the 
year in the country than the poet. And 
even when bound as fast as he to the city, 
they have not been forced to choose between 
[ 163 J 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

burning the candle at both ends or abandon- 
ing their art. 

But for some recondite reason — perhaps 
because this art cannot be taught at all — it 
has always been an accepted American con- 
viction that poetry is a thing which may be 
thrown off at any time as a side issue by highly 
organized persons, most of whose time and 
strength and faculties are engaged in a vigor- 
ous and engrossing hand-to-hand bout with 
the wolf on the threshold — a most practical, 
philistine wolf, moreover, which never heard 
of rhyme or rhythm, and whose whole ac- 
quaintance with prosody is confined to a cer- 
tain greedy familiarity with frayed masculine 
and feminine endings. 

As a result of this common conviction our 
poets have almost invariably been obliged 
to make their art a quite subsidiary and hap- 
hazard affair, like the rearing of children by a 
mother who is forced to go out and scrub from 
early morning till late at night and has to 
leave little Johnnie tied in his high chair to 
[ 164 1 



FOR POETS 

be fed by an older sister on crusts dabbled in 
the pot of cold coffee. No wonder that so 
much of our verse "jest growed," like Topsy. 
And the resulting state of things has but 
served to reinforce our belief that to make 
the race of poets spend their days in correct- 
ing encyclopedia proof, or clerking, or running, 
notebook in hand, to fires — inheres in the 
eternal fitness of things. 

Bergson says in "Creative Evolution," that 
"an intelligence which reflects is one that 
originally had a surplus of energy to spend, 
over and above practically useful efforts." 
Does it not follow that when we make the 
poet spend all his energy in the practically 
useful effort of running to fires, we prevent 
him from enjoying the very advantage which 
made man a reflective being, to say nothing 
of a poet? 

Perhaps we have never yet realized that 
this attitude of ours would turn poetic suc- 
cess into a question of the survival of that 
paradox, the commercially shrewd poet, or 
r 165 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

of the poet who by some happy accident of 
birth or marriage has been given an income, 
or of that prodigy of versatility who, in our 
present stage of civilization, besides being 
mentally and spiritually fit for the poet's 
calling, is also physically fit to bear the strain 
of doing two men's work; or, perhaps we had 
better say, three men's — for simply being a 
good poet is about as nerve-consuming an 
occupation as any two ordinary men could 
support in common — and the third would 
have to run to fires for the first two. 

It is natural to the character of the American 
business man to declare that the professional 
poet has no reason for existence qua poet un- 
less he can make his art support him. But let 
the business man bear in mind that if he had 
the power to enforce such a condition, he 
would be practically annihilating the art. For 
it is literally true that, if plays were excluded, 
it would take not even a five-foot shelf to 
contain all the first-rate poetry which was 
ever written by poets in a state of poetic self- 
[ 166 1 



FOR POETS 

support. " Could a man live by it," the author 
of "The Deserted Village" once wrote to 
Henry Goldsmith, "it were not unpleasant 
employment to be a poet." Alas, the fatal 
condition! For the art itself has almost never 
fed and clothed its devotee — at least until 
his best creative days are done and he has 
become a "grand old man." More often the 
poet has attained not even this reward. 
Wordsworth's lines on Chatterton have a 
wider application: 

"What treasure found he? Chains and pains and sorrow — 
Yea, all the wealth those noble seekers find 
Whose footsteps mark the music of mankind! 
*T was his to lend a life: 't was Man's to borrow: 
'T was his to make, but not to share, the morrow." 

Those who insist upon judging the art of 
poetry on the hard American "cash basis" 
ought to be prepared, for the sake of consist- 
ency, to apply the same criterion as well to 
colleges, public schools, symphony orchestras, 
institutions for scientific research, missions, 
settlements, libraries, and all other unlucra- 
[ 167] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

live educational enterprises. With inexora- 
ble logic they should be prepared to insist 
that people really do not desire or need 
knowledge or any sort of uplift because they 
are not prepared to pay its full cost. It is 
precisely this sort of logic which would treat 
the Son of Man if He should appear among 
us, to a bench in Bryant Park, and a place in 
the bread-line, and send the mounted police 
to ride down his socialistic meetings in Union 
Square. No! poetry and most other forms of 
higher education have always had to be sub- 
sidized — and probably always will. When 
wisely subsidized, however, this art is very 
likely to repay its support in princely fashion. 
In fact, I know of no other investment to-day 
that would bid fair to bring us in so many 
thousand per cent, of return as a small fresh- 
air fund for poets. 

We Americans are rather apt to complain 

of the comparatively poor, unoriginal showing 

which our poets have as yet made among 

those of other civilized nations. We are 

[ 168 ] 



FOR POETS 

quietly disgusted that only two of all our 
bards have ever made their work forcibly 
felt in Europe; and that neither Poe nor Whit- 
man has ever profoundly influenced the great 
masses of his own people. 

Despite our splendid inheritance, our richly 
mingled blood, our incomparably stimulating 
New World atmosphere, why has our poetry 
made such a meager showing among the 
nations? The chief reason is obvious. We 
have been unwilling to let our poets live while 
they were working for us. True, we have the 
reputation of being an open-handed, even an 
extravagantly generous folk. But thrifti- 
ness in small things often goes with an extrav- 
agant disposition, much as manifestations of 
piety often accompany wickedness like flying 
buttresses consciously placed outside the edi- 
fice. We have spent millions on bronze and 
marble book-palaces which shall house the 
works of the poets. We have spent more 
millions on universities which shall teach these 
works. But as for making it possible for our 
F 169 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

few real poets to produce works, and com- 
pletely fulfill their priceless functions, we 
have always satisfied ourselves by decreeing: 

Let there be a sound cash basis." 
So it came to pass that when the first 

■xuberant, pioneer energy-margin of our race 
began to be consumed by the new and ab- 
normal type of city life, it became no longer 
possible for the poets to put as much soul- 
sinew as theretofore into their lines, after 
they had toilfully earned the luxury of trying 
to be our idealistic leaders. For often their 
initial efforts consumed their less than pioneer 
vitality. And how did we treat them from 
the first? In the old days we set Longfellow 
and Lowell at one of the most exhausting of 
professions — teaching. We made Emerson 
do one-night lecture-stands all winter long in 
the West — sometimes for five dollars a lecture 
and feed for his horse. We made Bryant ruin 
a gift as elemental as Wordsworth's, in journal- 
ism; Holmes, visit patients at all hours of the 
day and night; Poe, take to newspaper offices 
[ 170 ] 



FOR POETS 

and drink. We made Whitman drive nails, 
set type and drudge in the Indian Bureau in 
Washington, from which he was dismissed for 
writing the most original and the most poetic of 
American books. Later he was rescued from 
want only by the humiliation of a public 
European subscription. Lanier we allowed to 
waste away in a dingy lawyer's office, then kill 
himself so fast by teaching and writing rail- 
way advertisements and playing the flute 
in a city orchestra that he was forced to defer 
composing "Sunrise" until too weak with 
fever to carry his hand to his lips. And this 
was eleven years after that brave spirit's 
single cry of reproach: 

"Why can we poets dream us beauty, so, 
But cannot dream us bread? " 

With Lanier the physical exhaustion in- 
cident to the modern speeding-up process 
began to be more apparent. Edward Rowland 
Sill we did away with in his early prime 
through journalism and teaching. We curbed 
[ 171 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

and pinched and stunted the promising art of 
Richard Watson Gilder by piling upon him 
several men's editorial work. We created a 
poetic resemblance between Arthur Upson 
and the hero of "The Divine Fire" by em- 
ploying him in a bookstore. We made William 
Vaughn Moody teach in a city environ- 
ment utterly hostile to his poetry, and later 
set the hand that gave us "An Ode in Time 
of Hesitation" to the building of popular 
melodrama. These are only a tithe of the 
things that we have done to the hardiest of 
those benefactors of ours: 

"The poets, who on earth have made us heirs 
Of truth and pure delight." 

It is not pleasant to dwell on the fate of those 
less sturdy ones who have remained mute, 
inglorious Miltons for lack of a little practical 
appreciation and' a small part of a small 
fresh-air fund. 

So far as I know, Thomas Bailey Aldrich is 
the only prominent figure among the poets 
[ 172 ] 



FOR POETS 

of our elder generations who was given the 

means of devoting himself entirely to his art. 

And even his fortune was not left to him by 

his practical, poetry-loving friend until so 

late in the day that his creative powers had 

already begun to decline through age and 

over-much magazine editing. 

More than almost any other civilized nation 

we have earned Allen Upward's reproach in 

"The New Word": 

There are two kinds of human outcasts. Man, 
in his march upward out of the deep into the light, 
throws out a vanguard and a rearguard, and both 
are out of step with the main body. Humanity 
condemns equally those who are too good for it, 
and those who are too bad. On its Procrustean 
bed the stunted members of the race are racked; 
the giants are cut down. It puts to death with 
the same ruthless equality the prophet and the 
atavist. The poet and the drunkard starve side 
by side. . . . Literature is the chief ornament of 
humanity; and perhaps humanity never shows it- 
self uglier than when it stands with the pearl shin- 
ing on its forehead, and the pearl-maker crushed 
beneath its heel. . . . England will always have 
fifteen thousand a j year for some respectable 
clergyman; she will never have it for Shelley. 

[ 173 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

Yes, but how incomparably better England 
has treated her poets than America has 
treated hers! What convenient little plums, 
as De Quincey somewhat wistfully remarked, 
were always being found for Wordsworth 
just at the psychological moment; and they 
were not withheld, moreover, until he was 
full of years and honors. Indeed, we owe 
this poet to the poet-by-proxy of whom 
Wordsworth wrote, in "The Prelude": 

"He deemed that my pursuits and labours, lay 
Apart from all that leads to wealth, or even 
A necessary maintenance insures 
Without some hazard to the finer sense." 

How tenderly the frail bodies of Coleridge 
and of Francis Thompson were cared for by 
their appreciators. How potently the Civil 
List and the laureateship have helped a long, 
if most uneven, line of England's singers. 
Over against our solitary ageing Aldrich, how 
many great English poets like Byron, Keats, 
the Brownings, Tennyson, and Swinburne 
have found' themselves with small but inde- 
[ 174 ] 



FOR POETS 

pendent incomes, free to give their whole 
unembarrassed souls and all that in them was 
to their art. And all this since the close of 
the age of patronage! 

Why have we never had a Wordsworth, or 
a Browning? For one thing, because this 
nation of philanthropists has been too thought- 
less to found the small fellowship in creative 
poetry which might have freed a Wordsworth 
of ours from communion with a cash-book to 
wander chanting his new-born lines among 
the dreamy Adirondack lakes or the frowning 
Sierras; or that might have sought out our 
Browning in his grocery store and built 
him a modest retreat among the Thousand 
Islands. If not too thoughtless to act thus, 
we have been too timid. We have been too 
much afraid of encouraging weaklings by 
mistake. We have been, in fact, more afraid 
of encouraging a single mediocre poet than of 
neglecting a score of Shelleys. But we should 
remember that even if the weak are encour- 
aged with the strong, no harm is done. 
[ 175 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

It can not be too strongly insisted upon that 
the poor and mediocre verse which has always 
been produced by every age is practically 
innocuous. It hurts only the publishers who 
are constantly being importuned to print the 
stuff, and the distinguished men and women 
who are burdened with presentation copies 
or requests for criticism. These unfortunates 
all happen to be capable of emitting loud and 
authoritative cries of distress about the men- 
ace of bad poets. But we should discount 
these cries one hundred per cent. For nobody 
else is hurt by the bad poets, because nobody 
else pays the slightest attention to them. 
Time and their own "inherent perishable- 
ness " soon remove all traces of the poetasters. 
It were better to help hundreds of them than 
to risk the loss of one new Shelley. And do 
we realize how many Shelleys we may actually 
have lost already? I think it possible that we 
may have had more than one such potential 
singer to whom we never allowed any leisure 
or sympathy or margin of vitality to turn into 
[ 176 ] 



FOR POETS 

poetry. Perhaps there is more grim truth 
than humor in Mark Twain's vision of heaven 
where Captain Stormfield saw a poet as great 
as Shakespeare who hailed, I think, from Ten- 
nessee. The reason why the world had never 
heard of him was that his neighbors in Ten- 
nessee had regarded him as eccentric and had 
ridden him out of town on a rail and assisted 
his departure to a more congenial clime above. 

We complain that we have had no poet to 
rank with England's greatest. I fear that it 
would have been useless for us to have had 
such a person. We probably would not have 
known what to do with him. 

I realize that mine is not the popular side 
of this question and that an occasional poet 
with an income may be found who will even 
argue against giving incomes to other poets. 
Mr. Aldrich, for instance, wrote, after com- 
ing into his inheritance: 

"A man should live in a garret aloof, 

And have few friends, and go poorly clad, 
With an old hat stopping the chink in the roof, 
To keep the goddess constant and glad." 

[ 177 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

But a friend of Mr. Aldrich's, one of his 
poetic peers, has assured me that it was not 
the poet's freedom from financial cares at 
all, but premature age, instead, that made 
his goddess of poesy fickle after the advent 
of the pitifully belated fortune. Mr. Stedman 
spoke a far truer word on this subject. 
"Poets," he said, "in spite of the proverb, 
sing best when fed by wage or inheritance." 
" *T is the convinced belief of mankind," 
wrote Francis Thompson with a sardonic 
smile, "that to make a poet sing you must 
pinch his belly, as if the Almighty had con- 
structed him like certain rudimentarily vocal 
dolls." "No artist," declares Arnold Bennett, 
"was ever assisted in his career by the yoke, 
by servitude, by enforced monotony, by 
economic inferiority." Ajid Bliss Carman 
speaks out loud and bold: "The best poets 
who have come to maturity have always had 
some means of livelihood at their command. 
The idea that any sort of artist or workman 
is all the better for being doomed to a life of 
f 178 1 



FOR POETS 

penurious worry, is such a silly old fallacy, 
one wonders it could have persisted so long." 
The wolf may be splendid at suckling journal- 
ism and various other less inspired sorts of 
writing, but she is a ferocious old stepmother 
to poetry. 

There are some who snatch eagerly at any 
argument in support of the existing order, 
and who triumphantly point out the number 
of good poems that have been written under 
"seemingly" adverse conditions. But they do 
not stop to consider how much better these po- 
ems might have been made under "seemingly" 
favorable conditions. Percy Mackaye is right 
in declaring that the few singers left to English 
poetry after our "wholesale driving-out and 
killing-out of poets . . . are of two sorts: 
those with incomes and those without. 
Among the former are found most of the ex- 
cellent names in English poetry, a fact which 
is hardly a compliment to our civilization." 

Would that one of those excellent philan- 
thropists who has grown so accustomed to 
I 179 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

giving a million to libraries and universities 
that the act has become slightly mechanical 
— might realize that he has, with all his 
generosity, made no provision as yet for help- 
ing one of the most indispensable of all edu- 
cational institutions — the poet. Would that 
he might realize how little good the poet of 
genius can derive from the universities — 
places whose conservative formalism is even 
dangerous to his originality, because they 
try to melt him along with all the other 
students and pour him into their one mold. 
It is distressing to think of all the sums now 
devoted to inducing callow, overdriven sopho- 
mores to compose forced essays and doggerel, 
by luring them on with the glitter of cash 
prizes. One shudders to think of all the fellow- 
ship money which is now being used to finance 
reluctant young dry-as-dusts while they are 
preparing to pack still tighter the already 
overcrowded ranks of "professors of English 
literature" — whose profession, as Gerald 
Stanley Lee justly remarks, is founded on the 
[ 180 ] 



FOR POETS 

striking principle that a very great book can 
be taught by a very little man. This is a 
department of human effort which, as now 
usually conducted, succeeds in destroying 
much budding appreciation of poetry. Why 
endow these would-be interpreters of poetry, 
to the neglect of the class of artists whose 
work they profess to interpret? What should 
we think of England if her Victorian poets 
had all happened to be penniless, and she had 
packed them off to Grub Street and invested, 
instead, in a few more professors of Victorian 
literature? 

Why should not a few thousands out of the 
millions we spend on education be used to 
found fellowships of creative poetry? These 
would not be given at first to those who wish 
to learn to write poetry; for the first thousands 
would be far too precious for use in any such 
wild-cat speculations. They would be de- 
voted, rather, to poets of proved quality, who 
have already, somehow, learned their art, 
and who ask no more wondrous boon from 

r i8i i 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

life than fresh air and time to regain and keep 
that necessary margin of vitality which must 
go to the making of genuine poetry. 

I would not have the incumbent of such a 
fellowship, however, deprived suddenly of all 
outer incentives for effort. The abrupt tran- 
sition from constant worry and war among 
his members to an absolutely unclouded life 
of pure vocation-following might be almost too 
violent a shock, and unsettle him and injure 
his productivity for a time. 

The award of such a fellowship must not, 
of course, involve the least hint of charity 
or coercion. It should be offered and ac- 
cepted as an honor, not as a donation. The 
yearly income should, in my opinion, be small. 
It should be such a sum as would almost, but 
not quite, support the incumbent very simply 
in the country, and still allow for books and 
an occasional trip to town. In some cases an 
income of a thousand dollars, supplemented by 
the little that poetry earns and possibly by 
a random article or story in the magazines, 
[ 182 ] 



FOR POETS 

would enable a poet to lead a life of the largest 
effectiveness. 

It is my belief that almost any genuine 
poet who is now kept in the whirl by economic 
reasons and thus debarred from the free prac- 
tice of his calling would gladly relinquish 
even a large salary and reduce his life to sim- 
ple terms to gain the inestimable privilege 
of devoting himself wholly to his art before 
the golden bowl is broken. Many of those 
who are in intimate touch with the poets of 
America to-day could show any philanthro- 
pist how to do his land and the world more 
actual, visible, immediate good by devoting 
a thousand dollars to poetry, than by allow- 
ing an hundred times that sum to slip into the 
ordinary well-worn grooves of philanthropy. 

Some years ago a questionnaire was sub- 
mitted to various literary men by a poetry- 
lover who hoped to induce a wealthy friend 
to subsidize poets of promise in case these 
literary leaders approved the plan. While the 
younger writers warmly favored the idea, a 
[ 183 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

few of the older ones discouraged it. These 
were, in all cases, men who had made a 
financial success in more lucrative branches of 
literature than poetry; and it was natural for 
the veterans, who had brawnily struggled 
through the burden and heat of the day, to 
look with the unsympathetic eye of the sturdy 
upon those frailer ones of the rising generation 
who perhaps might, without assistance, be 
eliminated in the rough-and-tumble of the 
literary market-place. Of course it was but 
human for the veterans to insist that any 
real genius among their youthful competitors 
"would out," and that any assistance would 
but make life too soft for the youngsters, 
and go to swell the growing "menace" of 
bad verse by mitigating the primal rigors 
of natural selection. No doubt the genera- 
tion of writers older than Wordsworth quite 
innocently uttered these very same senti- 
ments in voices of deep authority when it 
was proposed to offer this young person a 
chance to compose in peace. No. One fears 
[ 184 ] 



FOR POETS 

that the attitude of these veterans was not 
wholly judicial. But then, why should any 
haphazard group of creative artists be 
expected to be judicial, anyway? One 
might as reasonably go to the Louvre for 
classes in conic sections, or to the Garden 
of the Gods for instruction in Rabbinical 
theology. 

Few supporters of the general plan, on the 
other hand, were wholly in favor of all the 
measures proposed for carrying it out. Some 
of the most telling criticisms went to show 
that while poets of undoubted ability ought 
to be helped, the method of their selection 
offers a grave difficulty. H. G. Wells, who 
heartily approved the main idea, brought 
out the fact that it would never do to leave 
the choice to a jury, as no jury would ever 
have voted for half of the great poets who 
have perished miserably. Juries are much 
too conventionally minded. For they are 
public functionaries; or, if not that, at least 
they feel self-consciously as if they were going 
[ 185 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

to be held publicly responsible, and are apt 
to bring extremely conventional, and perhaps 
priggish, standards to bear upon their choice. 
"They invariably become timid and narrow," 
wrote Mr. Wells, "and seek refuge in practical, 
academic, and moral tests that invariably 
exclude the real men of genius." 

Prizes and competitions were considered 
equally ill-advised methods of selection. It 
is significant that these methods are now being 
rapidly dropped in the fields of sculpture and 
architecture. For the mere thought of a 
competition is a thing essentially antagonistic 
to the creative impulse; and talent is likely 
to acquit itself better than genius in such a 
struggle. The idea of a poetic competition is 
a relic of a pioneer mode of thought. Mr. 
Wells concluded that the decision should be 
made by the individual. But I cannot agree 
with him that that same individual should 
be the donor of the fellowship. It seems to 
me that this would-be savior of our American 
poetry should select the best judge of poets 
[ 186 ] 



FOR POETS 

and poetry that he can discover and be guided 
by his advice. 

On general principles, there are several 
things that this judge should not be. He should 
not be a professor of English, because of the 
professor's usual bias toward the academic. 
Besides, these fellowships ought not in any 
way to be associated with institutions of 
learning — places which are apt to fetter 
poets and surround them with an atmosphere 
hostile to the creative impulse. Neither 
should this momentous decision be left to 
editors or publishers, because they are usually 
suffering from literary indigestion caused by 
skimming too many manuscripts too fast, 
and because, at any rate, they ordinarily pay 
little attention to poetry and hold it com- 
mercially "in one grand despise." Nor should 
the normal type of poet be chosen as judge 
to decide this question. For the poet is apt 
to have a narrow, one-sided view of the field. 
He has probably developed his own distinc- 
tive style and personality at the expense of 
[ 187 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

artistic catholicity and kindly breadth of 
critical judgment. The creative and the 
critical faculties are usually as distinct and 
as mutually exclusive spheres as that of the 
impassioned, partisan lawyer and the cool, 
impartial judge. 

To whom, then, should the decision be 
left? It should, in my opinion, be left to 
a real judge — to some broad, keen critic of 
poetry with a clear, unbiased contemporary 
view of the whole domain of the art. It 
matters not whether he is professional or 
amateur, so he is untouched by academicism 
and has not done so much reading or writing 
as to impair his mental digestion and his 
clarity of vision. Care, of course, would have 
to be used in safeguarding the critic- judge 
against undue pressure in favor of this candi- 
date or that; and in safeguarding the incum- 
bent of the fellowship from yet more insidious 
influences. For the apparently liberated poet 
would merely have exchanged prisons if he 
learned that the founder of the fellowship 
[ 188 ] 



FOR POETS 

wished to dictate what sort of poetry he 
should write. 

The idea of poetry fellowships is not as 
novel as it perhaps may sound. It is no mere 
empirical theory. Americans ought to be 
proud to know that, in a modest way, it has 
recently been tried here, and is proving a 
success. I am told that already two masters 
of poetry have been presented to us as free 
workers in their art by two Boston philan- 
thropists, and have been enabled to accom- 
plish some of their best work through such 
fellowships as are here advocated. This 
fact should put cities like New York, Pitts- 
burg, and Chicago on their mettle. For they 
must realize that Boston, with her quiet, slow- 
moving, Old- World pace, has not done to 
poetry a tithe of the harm that her more 
energetic neighbors have, and should there- 
fore not be suffered to bear the entire brunt 
of the expiation. 

Men say that money cannot buy a joyful 
heart. But next to writing a great poem, I 
\ 189 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

can scarcely imagine a greater happiness than 
to know that a thousand of my dollars had 
enabled an imprisoned genius to shake from 
his shoes the dust of a city office and go for 
a year to "God's outdoors," there to free his 
system of some of the beauty that had 
chokingly accumulated there until it had 
grown an almost intolerable pain. What joy 
to know that my fellowship had given men the 
modern New World "Hyperion," or "Pre- 
lude," or "Ring and the Book"! And even 
if that whole year resulted in nothing more 
than a "Skylark," or a "Rabbi Ben Ezra," 
or a "Crossing the Bar" — could one possi- 
bly consider such a result in the same thought- 
wave with dollars and cents? 

But this thousand dollars might do some- 
thing even better than help produce counter- 
parts of famous poems created in other times 
and lands. It might actually secure the in- 
estimable boon of a year's leisure, a procession 
of peaceful vistas, and a brimming cup for 
one of that "new brood" of "poets to come" 
[ 190 ] 



FOR POETS 

which Walt Whitman so confidently counted 
upon to 'justify him and answer what he 
was for.' This handful of gold might make 
it possible for one of these new poets to come 
into his own, and ours, at once, and in his 
own person accomplish that fusion, so de- 
voutly to be wished, of those diverse factors of 
the greatest poetry which have existed among 
us thus far only in awful isolation — the posses- 
sion of this one and that of our chief singers. 

How fervently we poetry-lovers wish that 
one of the captains of industry would feel 
impelled to put his hand into his pocket — 
if only into his watch-pocket — or adorn his 
last testament with a modest codicil! It 
would be such poetic justice if one of those 
who have prospered through the very speed- 
ing-up process which has so seriously crippled 
our poetry, should devote to its service a 
small tithe of what he has won from poetry's 
loss — and thus hasten our renaissance of 
singers, and bring a new dawn, 'brighter than 
before known/ out of the dusk of the poets. 



IX 

THE JOYOUS MISSION OF MECHANICAL 

MUSIC 

I WONDER if any other invention has 
ever, in such a brief time, made so many 
joyful hearts as the invention of mechanical 
music. It has brought light, peace, gladness, 
and the gift of self-expression to every third 
or fourth flat, villa, and lonely farmhouse in 
the land. Its voice has literally gone out 
through all the earth, and with a swiftness 
more like that of light than of sound. 

Only yesterday we were marveling at the 
discovery of the larger magazine audience. 
Until then we had never dreamed of address- 
ing millions of fellow creatures at one time, 
as the popular magazine now does. Imagine 
the astonished delight of Plato or Cervantes, 
Poe or Dickens, if they had been given in 
one week an audience equivalent in number 
r 192 1 



MISSION OF MUSIC 

to five thousand readers a year for ten cen- 
turies! Dickens would have called it, I 
think, " immortality- while-you-wait." Yet 
this sort of immortality was recently placed 
at the immediate disposal of the ordinary 
writer. 

The miracle was unique in history. But it 
did not long remain so. Not content with 
raining this wonder upon us, history at once 
poured down a greater. One morning we 
awoke to find a new and still vaster medium 
of expression, a medium whose globe-girdling 
voice was to that of the five-million reader 
magazine as the roar of Niagara to the roar 
of a Philadelphia trolley-car. To-day, from 
wherever civilized man has obtained even 
a temporary foothold, there arise without 
ceasing the accents of mechanical music, 
which talk persuasively to all in a language so 
universal that even the beasts understand it 
and cock applauding ears at the sound of the 
master voice. So that, while the magazine 
writers now address the million, the composers 
[ 193 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

and singers and players make their bows to 
the billion. 

Their omnipresence is astonishing. They 
are the last to bid you farewell when you 
leave civilization. They are the first to greet 
you on your return. When I canoed across 
the wild Allagash country, I was sped from 
Moosehead Lake by Caruso, received with 
open arms at the halfway house by the great- 
hearted Plancon, and welcomed to Fort Kent 
by Sousa and his merry men. With Schu- 
mann-Heinck, Melba, and Tetrazzini I once 
camped in the heart of the Sierras. When I 
persisted to the uttermost secret corner of 
the Dolomites, I found myself anticipated by 
Kreisler and his fiddle. They tell me that 
the portly Victor Herbert has even penetrated 
with his daring orchestra through darkest 
Africa and gone on to arrange a special bene- 
fit, in his home town, for the dalai-lama of 
Tibet. 

One of the most promising things about 
mechanical music is this: No matter what 
[ 194 ] 




MISSION OF MUSIC 

kind of music or quality of performance it 
offers you, you presently long for something 
a little better — unless your development 
has been arrested. It makes small difference 
in this respect which one of the three main 
varieties of instrument you happen to own. 
It may be the phonograph. It may be the 
kind of automatic piano which accurately 
reproduces the performances of the master 
pianists. It may be the piano-player which 
indulgently supplies you with technic ready- 
made, and allows you to throw your own soul 
into the music, whether you have ever taken 
lessons or not. Or it may be a combination 
of the last two. The influence of these 
machines is progressive. It stands for evolu- 
tion rather than for devolution or revolution. 
Often, however, the evolution seems to 
progress by sheer accident. This is the way 
the accident is likely to happen. Jones is 
buying records for the family phonograph. 
One may judge of his particular stage of 
musical evolution by his purchases, which 
F 195 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

are: "Meet me in St. Louis, Louis," "Dance 
of the Honey Bells," "Hello Central, Give me 
Heaven," "Fashion Plate March," and "I 
Know that' I'll be Happy when I Die." He 
also notices in the catalogue a piece called 
"Tannhauser March," and, after some hesita- 
tion, buys this as well, because the name 
sounds so much like his favorite brand of 
beer that he suspects it to be music of a con- 
vivial nature — a medley of drinking-songs, 
perhaps. 

But that evening in the parlor it does not 
seem much like beer. When the Mephisto 
Military Band strikes it up — far from seem- 
ing in the least alcoholic, it exhilarates nobody. 
So Jones inters it in the darkest corner of 
the music-cabinet. And the family devote 
themselves to the cake-walks and comic 
medleys, the fandangoes and tangos, the 
xylophone solos, the shakedowns and break- 
downs and the rags and tatters of their col- 
lection until they have thoroughly exhausted 
the delights thereof. Then, having had time 
[ 196 ] 



MISSION OF MUSIC 

to forget somewhat the flatness of "Tann- 
hauser," and for want of anything better to 
do, they take out the despised record, dust it, 
and insert it into the machine. But this 
time, curiously enough, the thing does not 
sound quite so flat. After repeated playings, 
it even begins to rival the "Fashion Plate 
March" in its appeal. And it keeps on grow- 
ing in grace until within a year the "Fashion 
Plate March" is as obsolete as fashion plates 
have a habit of growing within a year, while 
"Tannhauser" has won the distinction of 
being the best-wearing record in the cabinet. 
Then it begins to occur to the Jones family 
that there must be two kinds of musical food : 
candy and staples. Candy, like the "Fashion 
Plate March," tastes wonderfully sweet to 
the unsophisticated palate as it goes down; 
but it is easy to take too much. And the 
cheaper the candy, the swifter the consequent 
revulsion of feeling. As for the staples, there 
is nothing very piquant about their flavor; 
but if they are of first quality, and if one 
[ 197 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

keeps his appetite healthy, one seems to enjoy 
them more and more and to thrive on them 
three times a day. 

Accordingly, Jones is commissioned, when 
next he visits the music-store, to get a few 
more records like "Tannhauser." On this 
occasion, he may even be rash enough to 
experiment with a Schubert march, or a 
Weber overture, or one of the more popular 
movements of a Beethoven sonata. And so 
the train of evolution will rush onward, bear- 
ing the Joneses with it until fashion-plate 
marches are things of the misty, backward 
horizon, and the family has, by little and 
little, come to know and love the whole 
blessed field of classical music. And they 
have found that the word "classical" is not a 
synonym for dry-rot, but that it simply 
means the music that wears best. 

However the glorious mistake may occur, 

it is being made by someone every hour. 

By such hooks and crooks as these, good 

music is finding its way into more and more 

[ 198 ] 



MISSION OF MUSIC 

homes. Although its true "classical" nature 
is detected at the first trial, it is not thrown 
away, because it cost good money. It is put 
away and bides its time; and some day the 
surprising fact that it has wearing qualities 
is bound to be discovered. To those who 
believe in the law of musical evolution, and 
who realize that mechanical music has reached 
the wide world, and is even beginning to pene- 
trate into the public library, the possibility 
of these happy accidents means a sure and 
swift general development in the apprecia- 
tion of the best music. 

Those who know that man's musical taste 
tends to grow better and not worse, know 
also that any music is better than no music. 
A mechanical instrument which goes is better 
than a new concert grand piano that remains 
shut. 

"Canned music may not be the highest 

form of art," the enthusiast will say with a 

needless air of half apology, half defiance, 

"but I enjoy it no end." And then he will 

[ 199 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

go on to tell how the parlor melodeon had 
gathered dust for years until it was given in 
part exchange for a piano-player. And now 
the thing is the joy of the family, and the home 
is filled with color and effervescence, and every 
one's head is filled with at least a rudiment 
of living, growing musical culture. 

The fact is, the piano-player is turning 
thousands of supposedly humdrum, prosaic 
people into musical enthusiasts, to their own 
immense surprise. Many of these people are 
actually taking lessons in the subtle art of 
manipulating the machine. They are spending 
more money than they can afford on vast 
collections of rolls. They are going more 
and more to every important concert for 
hints on interpretation. Better still, the most 
musical among them are being piqued, by 
the combined merits and defects of the ma- 
chine, into learning to play an immechanical 
instrument for the joy of feeling less mech- 
anism interposed between themselves and 
"the real thing." 

[ 200 ] 






MISSION OF MUSIC 

Machinery has already done as much for 
the true spirit of music as the "safe and sane" 
movement has done for the true spirit of the 
Fourth of July. Both have shifted the em- 
phasis from brute noise and fireworks to more 
spiritual considerations. The piano-player 
has done a great deal to cheapen the glamour 
of mere technical display on the part of the 
virtuosi and toi redeem us from the thralldom 
of the school of Liszt. Our admiration for 
musical gymnastics and tight-rope balancing 
is now leaking away so fast through the per- 
forations of the paper rolls that the kind of 
display-piece known as the concerto is going 
out of fashion. The only sort of concerto 
destined to keep our favor is, I imagine, that 
of the Schumann or Brahms type, which de- 
pends for its effect not at all on display, but 
on sound musicianship alone. The virtuoso 
is destined soon to leave the circus business 
and bid a long farewell to his late colleagues, 
the sword-swallower, the trapeze artist, the 
strong man, the fat lady, the contortionist, 
[ 201 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

and the gentleman who conducts the shell- 
and-pea game. For presently the only thing 
that will be able to entice people to concerts 
will be the soul of music. Its body will be a 
perfectly commonplace affair. 

Many a good musician fears, I know, 
that machine-made music will not stop with 
annihilating vulgar display, but will do to 
death all professional music as well. This 
fear is groundless. Mechanical instruments 
will no more drive the good pianist or violinist 
or 'cellist out of his profession than the public 
library, as many once feared, will drive the 
bookseller out of business. For the library, 
after persuading people to read, has taught 
them how much pleasure may be had from 
owning a book, with the privilege of marking 
it and scribbling one's own ideas on the 
margins, and not having to rush it back to 
headquarters at inopportune moments and 
pay to a stern young woman a fine of eight 
cents. Likewise people are eventually led 
to realize that the joy of passively absorbing 
[ 202 ] 



MISSION OF MUSIC 

the product of phonograph or electric piano 
contrasts with the higher joy of listening 
creatively to music which the hearer helps to 
make, in the same way that borrowing a book 
of Browning contrasts with owning a book of 
Browning. I believe that, just as the libraries 
are yearly educating hosts of book-buyers, 
so mechanical music is cooperating with 
evolution to swell the noble army of those 
who support concerts and give private 
musicales. 

Of course there is no denying that the exist- 
ence of music-making machinery has a certain 
relaxing effect on some of the less talented 
followers of the muse of strumming, scraping, 
screeching, and blatting. This is because the 
soul of music is not in them. And in striving 
to reproduce its body, they perceive how hope- 
less it is to compete with the physical perfec- 
tion of the manufactured product. In like 
manner, the invention of canned meats doubt- 
less discouraged many minor cooks from fur- 
ther struggles with their craft. But these 
[ 203 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

losses, I, for one, cannot bring myself to 
mourn. 

What seems a sounder complaint is that the 
phonograph, because it reproduces with equal 
readiness music and the spoken word, may 
become an effective instrument of satire in 
the hands of the clever philistine. Let me 
illustrate. To the Jones collection of records, 
shortly after "Tannhauser" began to win its 
way, there was added a reactionary "comic" 
record entitled "Maggie Clancy's New 
Piano." In the record Maggie begins play- 
ing "Tannhauser" very creditably on her 
new instrument. Presently the voice of old 
Clancy is heard from another room calling, 
"Maggie!" The music goes on. There is a 
crescendo series of calls. The piano stops. 

"Yes, Father?" 

"Maggie, is the new pianny broke?" 

"No, Father; I was merely playing Wag- 



ner." 



Old Clancy meditates a moment; then, with 
a gentleness of touch that might turn a New 
[ 204 ] 



MISSION OF MUSIC 

York music critic green with envy, he replies: 
"Oh, I thought ye wuz shovelin' coal in the 
parlor stove." 

Records like these have power to retard and 
roughen the 'otherwise smooth course of a 
family's musical evolution; but they .are 
usually unable to arrest it. In general I 
think that such satires may fortify the elder 
generation in its conservative mistrust of 
classical music. But if they are only heard 
often enough by the young, I believe that the 
sympathies of the latter will end in chiming 
with the taste of the enlightened Maggie 
rather than with that of her father. 

Until recently a graver charge against the 
phonograph has been that it was so much 
better adapted for reproducing song than 
pure instrumental music that it was tending 
to identify the art of music in the minds of 
most men with song alone. This tendency 
was dangerous. For song is not all of music, 
nor even its most important part. The voice 
is naturally more limited in range, technic, 
[ 205 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

and variety of color than many another in- 
strument. And it is artificially handicapped 
by the rather absurd custom which forces 
the singer to drag in poetry (much to the 
latter's disadvantage), and therewith distract 
his own attention and that of his audience 
from the music. 

The fact remains that one art at a time is 
none too easy for even the most perfect 
medium of expression to cope with. To 
make a somewhat less than perfect instru- 
ment like the human voice, cope always with 
two simultaneously is an indication that the 
young art of music has not yet emerged from 
its teens. This is one reason why most song 
is as yet so intrinsically unmusical. Its reach 
is, as a rule, forced to exceed its grasp. Also 
the accident of having a fine voice usually 
determines a singer's career, though a perfect 
vocal organ does not necessarily imply a 
musical nature. The best voices, in fact, 
often belong, by some contrariety of fate, to 
the worst musicians. For these and other 

] 



MISSION OF MUSIC 

reasons, there is less of the true spirit of music 
to be heard from vocal cords than from the 
cords and reeds and brazen tubes of piano, 
organ, string quartet, and orchestra. Thus, 
when the phonograph threatened to identify 
song with music in general, it threatened to 
give the art a setback and make the singer 
the arch-enemy of the wider musical culture. 
Fortunately the phonograph now gives prom- 
ise of averting this peril by bringing up its 
reproduction of absolute music near to its 
vocal standard. 

Another charge against most machine-made 
music is its unhuman accuracy. The phono- 
graph companies seldom give out a record 
which is not practically perfect in technic 
and intonation. As for the mechanical piano, 
there is no escape from the certainty of just 
what notes are coming next — that is, if little 
Johnnie has not been editing the paper record 
with his father's leather-punch. Therefore 
one grows after a while to long for a few of 
those deviations from mathematical precision 
[ 207 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

which imply human frailty and lovableness. 
One reason why the future is veiled from us 
is that it is so painful to be certain that one's 
every prediction is coming true. 

A worse trouble with the phonograph is 
that it seems to leave out of account that 
essential part of every true musical perform- 
ance, the creative listener. A great many 
phonograph records sound as though the 
recorder had been performing to an audience 
no more spiritually resonant than the four 
walls of a factory. I think that the makers of 
another kind of mechanical instrument must 
have realized this oversight on the part of 
the phonograph manufacturer. I mean the 
sort of electric piano which faithfully repro- 
duces every nuance of the master pianists. 
Many of the records of this marvelous in- 
strument sound as though the recording-room 
of the factory had been "papered" with 
creative listeners who cooperated mightily 
with 1 the master on the stage. Would that 
the phonographers might take the hint! 
[ 208 ] 



MISSION OF MUSIC 

But no matter how effectively the creative 
listener originally cooperates with the maker 
of this kind of record, the electric piano 
does not appeal as strongly to the creative 
listener in his home as does the less perfect 
but more impressionable piano-player, which 
responds like a cycle to pedal and brake. For 
the records of the phonograph and of the 
electric piano, once they are made, are made. 
Thereafter they are as insensible to influence 
as the laws of the Medes and Persians. They 
do not admit the audience to an active, in- 
fluential part in the performance. But such 
a part in the performance is exactly what the 
true listener demands as his democratic right. 
And rather than be balked of it, he turns to 
the less sophisticated mechanism of the piano- 
player. This, at least, responds to his control. 

Undeniably, though, even the warmest en- 
thusiasts for the piano-player come in time to 
realize that their machine has distinct limita- 
tions; that it is better suited to certain pieces 
than to others. They find that music may be 
[ 209 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

performed on it with the more triumphant 
success the less human it is and the nearer it 
comes to the soullessness of an arabesque. 
The best operator, by pumping or pulling stops 
or switching levers, cannot entirely succeed 
in imbuing it with the breath of life. The dis- 
quieting fact remains that the more a certain 
piece demands to be filled with soul, the thin- 
ner and more ghost-like it comes forth. The 
less intimately human the music, the more 
satisfactorily it emerges. For example, the 
performer is stirred by the "Tannhauser 
March," as rendered by himself, with its 
flourish of trumpets and its general hurrah- 
boys. But he is unmoved by the apostrophe 
to the "Evening Star" from the same opera. 
For this, in passing through the piano-player, 
is almost reduced to a frigid astronomical 
basis. The singer is no longer Scotti or Bis- 
pham, but Herschel or Laplace. The operator 
may pump and switch until he breaks his heart 
— but if he has any real musical instinct, he 
will surely grow to feel a sense of lack in this 
\ 210 1 



MISSION OF MUSIC 

sort of music. So for the present, while con- 
fidently awaiting the invention of an improved 
piano-player, which shall give equally free ex- 
pression to every mood and tense of the human 
spirit — the operator learns to avoid the very 
soulful things as much as is practicable. 

At this stage of his development he usually 
begins to crave that supreme kind of music 
which demands a perfect balance of the in- 
tellectual, the sensuous, and the emotional. 
So he goes more often to concerts where such 
music is given. Saturated with it, he returns 
to his piano-player and plays the concert all 
over again. And his imagination is now so 
full of the emotional side of what he has 
just heard and is re-hearing, that he easily 
discounts the obvious shortcomings of the 
mechanical instrument. This is an excellent 
way of getting the most from music. One 
should not, as many do, take it from the 
piano-player before the concert and then go 
with its somewhat stereotyped accents so 
fixed in the mind as to obscure the heart of 
F 211 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

the performance. Rather, in preparation, 
let the score be silently glanced through. 
Leave wide the doors of the soul for the pre- 
cious spiritual part of the music to enter in 
and take possession. After this happens, 
use mechanical music to renew your memories 
of the concert, just as you would use a cata- 
logue illustrated with etchings in black and 
white, to renew your memory of an exhibition 
of paintings. 

The supreme mission of mechanical music 
is its direct educational mission. By this I 
mean something more than its educational 
mission to the many thousands of grown men 
and women whose latent interest in music it 
is suddenly awakening. I have in mind the 
girls and boys of the rising generation. If 
people can only hear enough good music when 
they are young, without having it forcibly fed 
to them, they are almost sure to care for it 
when they come to years of discretion. The 
reason why America is not more musical is 
[ 212 ] 






MISSION OF MUSIC 

that we men and women of to-day did not 
yesterday, as children, hear enough good mu- 
sic. Our parents probably could not afford 
it. It was then a luxury, implying expen- 
sive concert tickets or an elaborate musical 
training for someone in the family. 

The invention of mechanical instruments 
ended this state of affairs forever by suddenly 
making the best music as inexpensive as the 
worst. There exists no longer any financial 
reason why most children should not grow 
up in an atmosphere of the best music. And 
I believe that so soon as parents learn how 
to educate their children through the phono- 
graph or the mechanical piano, the world 
will realize with a start that the invention of 
these things is doing more for musical culture 
than the invention of printing did for literary 
culture. 

We must bear in mind, however, that the 

invention of mechanical instruments has come 

far earlier in the history of music than the 

invention of printing came in the history of 

[ 213 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

literature. Music is the youngest of the fine 
arts. It is in somewhat the same stage of 
development to-day that literature was in 
the time of Homer. It is in the age of oral — 
and aural — tradition. Most people still take 
in music through their ears alone. For all 
that the invention of note-printing means 
to them as enjoyers of music, they might 
almost as well be living seons before Guten- 
berg. Musically speaking, they belong to the 
Homeric age. 

Now the entrance of mechanical music upon 
the scene is making men depend on their ears 
more than ever. It is intensifying and speed- 
ing up this age of oral tradition. But in so do- 
ing, I believe that it is bound to shorten this 
age also, on the principle that the faster you 
go the sooner you arrive. Thus, machinery 
is hastening us toward the time when the per- 
son of ordinary culture will no more depend 
on his ears alone for the enjoyment of music 
than he now depends on his ears alone for the 
enjoyment of Shakespeare. 
F 214 1 




MISSION OF MUSIC 

Thanks to machine-made music, the day is 
coming the sooner when we shall behold, as 
neighbors in the ordinary bookcase, such pairs 
of counterparts as Milton and Bach, Beethoven 
and Shakespeare, Loeffler and Maeterlinck, 
Byron and Tschaikowsky, Mendelssohn and 
Longfellow, Nietzsche and Richard Strauss. 
Browning will stand up cheek by jowl with 
his one true affinity, Brahms. And the owner 
will sit by the quiet hearth reading to him- 
self with equal fluency and joy from Schubert 
and Keats. 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

It is only in a surrounding of personalities that personalities 
can as such make themselves seen and heard. 

Houston Stewabt Chamberlain. 

T)ETWEEN many of my readers and the 
-■-* joyful heart there seems to stand but 
a single obstacle — their lack of creative- 
ness. They feel that they could live and die 
happy if only they might become responsible 
for the creation of something which would 
remain to bless mankind after they are gone. 
But as it is, how can they have the joyful 
heart when they are continually being tor- 
tured by regret because God did not make 
masters of them? 

One is sad because he is not a master of 

poetry. He never sees A, his golden-tongued 

friend, without a pang very like the envy of 

a childless man for a happy father. But he 

[ 216 ] 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

has no suspicion that he is partly responsible 
for A's poetic excellence. Another thinks 
her life a mistake because the Master of all 
good workmen did not make her a sculptor. 
Yet all the while she is lavishing unawares 
upon her brother or son or husband the very 
stuff that art is made of. Others are incon- 
solable because no fairy wand at their birth 
destined them for men of original action, for 
discoverers in science, pianists, statesmen, or 
actors; for painters, philosophers, inventors, 
or architects of temples or of religions. 

Now my task in this last chapter is a more 
delightful one than if I were the usual solicitor 
of fiction, come to inform the poor-but-honest 
newsboy that he is a royal duke. It is my 
privilege to comfort many of the comfortless by 
revealing to them how and why they are — or 
may be — masters of an art as indispensable 
as the arts which they now regard so wistfully. 
I mean the art of master-making — the art 
of being a master by proxy. 

To be specific, let us single out one of the 
[ 217 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

arts and see what it means to master it by 
proxy. Suppose we consider the simple case 
of executive music. In a book called "The 
Musical Amateur" I have tried to prove (more 
fully than is here possible) that the repro- 
duction of music is a social act. It needs two: 
one to perform, one to appreciate. Both are 
almost equally essential to a good perform- 
ance. The man who appreciates a musical 
phrase unconsciously imitates it with almost 
imperceptible contractions of throat or lips. 
These contractions represent an incipient 
singing or whistling. Motions similar to 
these, and probably more fully developed, are 
made at the same time by his mind and his 
spirit. The whole man actually feels his way, 
physically and psychically, into the heart of 
the music. He is turned into a sentient 
sounding-board which adds its own contribu- 
tion of emotion to the music and sends it 
back by wireless telegraphy to the performer. 
When a violinist and a listener of the right 
sort meet for musical purposes, this is what 
[ 218 1 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

happens. The violinist happens to be in the 
mood for playing. This means that he has 
feelings which demand expression. These his 
bow releases. The music strikes the listener, 
sets him in vibration as if he were a sounding- 
board, and rouses in him feelings similar to 
those of the violinist. Enriched by this new 
contribution, the emotional complex resounds 
back to the violinist, intensifying his original 
"feeling-state." In its heightened form it 
then recoils back to the appreciator, "and so 
on, back and forth, growing in stimulating 
power at each recoil. The whole process is 
something like a hot * rally* in tennis, with the 
opponents closing in on each other and the 
ball shuttling across the net faster with 
every stroke as the point gains in excitement 
and pleasure. 'Social resonance' might be a 
good way of describing the thing." This, 
briefly told, is what passes between the player 
of music and his creative listener. 

In application this principle does not by 
any means stop with performing or composing 
[ 219 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

music or with the fine arts. It goes on to 
embrace more things in heaven and earth 
than are dreamed of in the fiddler's or in any 
other artist's philosophy. Perhaps it is not 
too much to say that no great passion or action 
has ever had itself adequately expressed with- 
out the cooperation of this social resonance, 
without the help of at least one of those 
modest, unrecognized partners of genius, the 
social resonators, the masters by proxy. 

Thanks, dear master-makers unawares! 
The gratitude of the few who understand you 
is no less sincere because you do not yet realize 
your own thank worthiness. Our children 
shall rise up and call you blessed. For in 
your quiet way, you have helped to create 
the world's creators — the preachers, prophets, 
captains, artists, discoverers, and seers of the 
ages. To these, you, unrecognized and una- 
wares, have been providing the very sinews 
of peace, vision, war, beauty, originality, and 
insight. 

What made the game of art so brilliant in 
[ 220 ] 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

the age of Pericles? It was not star playing 
by individuals . It was steady, consistent team- 
work by the many. Almost every one of the 
Athenians who were not masters were masters 
by proxy. In "The Foundations of the Nine- 
teenth Century" Chamberlain holds that 
Greek culture derived its incomparable charm 
from "a peculiar harmony of greatness"; 
and that "if our poets are not in every re- 
spect equal to the greatest poets of Athens, 
that is not the fault of their talent, but of 
those who surround them." Only imagine 
the joyful ease of being a poet in the Periclean 
atmosphere! It must have been as exhil- 
arating as coasting down into the Yosemite 
Valley with John Muir on an avalanche of 
snow. 

But even in that enlightened age the master 
received all the credit for every achievement, 
and his creative appreciator none at all. And 
so it has been ever since that particular 
amceba which was destined for manhood had 
a purse made up for him and was helped upon 
\ 221 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

the train of evolution by his less fortunate 
and more self-effacing friends who were des- 
tined to remain amoebae; because the master 
by proxy is such a retiring, unspectacular sort 
of person that he has never caught the popular 
imagination or found any one to sing his 
praises. But if he should ever resent this 
neglect and go on strike, we should realize 
that without him progress is impossible. For 
the real lords of creation are not always the 
apparent lords. We should bear in mind 
that the most important part of many a throne 
is not the red velvet seat, the back of cloth 
of gold, or the onyx arms that so sumptuously 
accommodate the awe and majesty of acknowl- 
edged kings. Neither is it the seed-pearl can- 
opy that intercepts a too searching light from 
majesty's complexion. It is a certain little 
filigreed hole in the throne-back which falls 
conveniently close to the sovereign's ear when 
he leans back between the periods of the 
wise, beauteous, and thrilling address to his 
subjects. 

[ 222 J 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

For doubled up in a dark, close box behind 
the chair of state is a humble, drab individual 
who, from time to time, applies his mouth 
to the wrong side of the filigreed hole and 
whispers things. If he were visible at all, he 
would look like the absurd prompter under 
the hood at the opera. He is not a famous 
person. Most people are so ignorant of his 
very existence that he might be pardoned for 
being an agnostic about it himself. The few 
others know little and care less. Only two or 
three of the royal family are aware of his 
name and real function. They refer to him 
as M. Power-Behind-the-Throne, Master-by- 
Proxy of State. 

There is one sign by which masters by proxy 
may be detected wherever met. They are 
people whose presence is instantly invigorat- 
ing. Before you can make out the color of 
their eyes you begin to feel that you are greater 
than you know. It is as if they wore diffused 
about them auras so extensive and powerful 
that entering these auras was equivalent to 
[ 223 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

giving your soul electric massage. You do 
not have to touch the hem of their garments 
nor even see them. The auras penetrate a 
brick wall as a razor penetrates Swiss cheese, 
And if you are fortunate enough to be on the 
other side of the partition, you become aware 
with a thrill that "virtue," in the beautiful, 
Biblical sense of the word, has gone out of 
somebody and into you. 

If ever I return to live in a city apartment 
(which may the gods f orf end !) I shall this time 
select the apartment with almost sole refer- 
ence to what comes through the walls. I 
shall enter one of those typical New York 
piles which O. Henry described as "paved 
with Parian marble in the entrance-hall, 
and cobblestones above the first floor," and 
my inquiry will be focused on things far other 
than Parian marble and cobblestones. I shall 
walk about the rooms and up and down the 
bowling-alleys of halls trying to make myself 
as sensitive to impressions as are the arms of 
the divining-rod man during his solemn 
[ 224 ] 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

parade with the wand of witch-hazel. And 
when I feel "virtue" from the next apart- 
ment streaming through the partition, there will 
I instantly give battle to the agent and take 
up my abode. And this though it be up six 
flights of cobblestones, without elevator, with- 
out closet-room, with a paranoiac for janitor, 
and radiators whose musical performance all 
the day long would make a Cleveland boiler 
factory pale with envy. For none of these 
things would begin to offset the privilege of 
living beside a red-letter wall whose influence 
should be as benignly constructive as Richard 
Washburn Child's "Blue Wall" was malignly 
destructive. 

To-day I should undoubtedly be much 
more of a person if I had once had the pleasure 
of living a wall away from Richard Watson 
Gilder. He was a true master by proxy. For 
he was a vastly more creative person than his 
published writings will ever accredit him 
with being. Not only with his pen, but also 
with his whole self he went about doing 
[ 225 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

good. "Virtue" fairly streamed from him 
all the time. Those bowed shoulders and 
deep-set, kindly eyes would emerge from the 
inner sanctum of the "Century" office. In 
three short sentences he would reject the story 
which had cost you two years of labor and 
travail. But all the time the fatal words 
were getting themselves uttered, so much 
"virtue" was passing from him into you that 
you would turn from his presence exhil- 
arated, uplifted, and while treading higher 
levels for the next week, would produce a 
check-bearing tale. The check, however, 
would not bring you a tithe of the "virtue" 
that the great editor's personal rebuff had 
brought. 

But more than to any editor, writers 
look to their readers for support, especially 
to their unknown correspondents — postal and 
psychic. Leonard Merrick has so finely 
expressed the attitude of many writers that 
I cannot forbear giving his words to his 
"public": 

r 226 1 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

I have thought of you so often and wanted to 
win a smile from you; you don't realize how I 
have longed to meet you — to listen to you, to 
have you lift the veil that hides your mind from 
me. Sometimes in a crowd I have fancied I caught 
a glimpse of you; I can't explain — the poise of 
the head, a look in the eyes, there was something 
that hinted it was You. And in a whirlwind of 
an instant it almost seemed that you would recog- 
nize me; but you said no word — you passed, a 
secret from me still. To yourself where you are 
sitting you are just a charming woman with "a 
local habitation and a name"; but to me you are 
not Miss or Madam, not M. or N. — you are a 
Power, and I have sought you by a name you have 
not heard — you are my Public. And my Lady, 
I am speaking to you! I feel your presence in 
my senses, though you are far away and I can't 
hear your answer. ... It is as if I had touched 
your hand across the page. 

There are probably more masters by proxy 
to be found among the world's mothers than 
in any other class. The profession of mother- 
hood is such a creative one, and demands so 
constant an outgo of unselfish sympathy, that 
a mother's technic as silent partner is usually 
kept in a highly efficient state. And occa- 
[ 227 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

sionally a mother of a genius deserves as much 
credit for him spiritually as physically. Think 
of Frau Goethe, for example. 

Many a genius attains a commanding posi- 
tion largely through the happy chance of 
meeting many powerful masters by proxy and 
through his happy facility for taking and 
using whatever creativeness these have to 
offer. Genius has been short-sightedly defined 
as "an infinite capacity for taking pains." 
Galton more truthfully holds that the triune 
factors of genius are industry, enthusiasm, and 
ability. Now if we were to insist, as so many 
do, on making a definition out of a single one 
of these factors to the neglect of the others, 
we should come perhaps nearer the mark by 
saying that genius is an infinite capacity for 
taking others' pains. But all such definings 
are absurd. For the genius absorbs and alche- 
mizes not only the industry of his silent 
partners, but also their ability and enthusiasm. 
Their enthusiasm is fortunately contained in a 
receptacle as generous as Philemon's famous 
[ 228 ] 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

pitcher. And the harder the genius tries to 
pour it empty, the more the sparkling liquid 
bubbles up inside. The transaction is like 
"the quality of mercy" — 

"It blesseth him that gives and him that takes." 

The ability to receive as well as give this 
sort of help varies widely with the individual. 
Some geniuses of large psychic power are able 
instantly to seize out of any crowd whatever 
creativeness there is in it. These persons are 
spiritual giants. Their strength is as the 
strength of ten because their grasp is sure. 
They are such stuff as Shakespeares are made of. 

Others are not psychically gifted. They 
can absorb creativeness only from their near- 
est and dearest, in the most favoring environ- 
ment, and only after the current has been 
seriously depleted by wastage in transmission. 
But these are the two extremes. They are as 
rare as extremes usually are. 

In general I believe that genius, though 
normally capable of drawing creativeness from 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

a number of different sources, has as a rule 
depended largely on the collaboration of one 
chief master by proxy. This idea gazes wide- 
eyed down a fascinating vista of speculation. 
Who, for instance, was Lincoln's silent partner? 
the power behind the throne of Charlemagne? 
Buddha's better self? Who were the secret 
commanders of Grant, Wellington, and Caesar? 
Who was Moliere's hidden prompter? the 
conductor of the orchestra called Beethoven? 
the psychic comrade of Columbus? 

I do not know. For history has never com- 
memorated, as such, the masters by proxy 
with honor due, or indeed with any honor 
or remembrance at all. It will take centuries 
to explore the past with the sympathetic 
eye and the understanding heart in order to 
discover what great tombs we have most 
flagrantly neglected. 

Already we can single out a few of them. 

The time is coming when music-lovers will 

never make a pilgrimage to the resting-place 

of Wagner without making another to the 

[ 230 1 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

grave of Mathilde Wesendonk, whose "virtue" 
breathed into "Tristan and Isolde" the breath 
of life. We shall not much longer neglect 
the tomb of Charles Darwin's father, who, by 
making the evolutionist financially independ- 
ent, gave his services to the world. Nor 
shall we disregard the memory of that 
other Charles-Darwin-by-proxy — his wife. 
For her tireless comradeship and devotion and 
freely lavished vitality were an indispensable 
reservoir of strength to the great invalid. 
Without it the world would never have had 
the "Origin of Species" or the "Descent of 
Man." 

Other instances throng to mind. I have 
small doubt that Charles Eliot Norton was 
the silent partner of Carlyle, Ruskin, and 
Lowell; Ste. Clare of Francis of Assisi; Joachim 
and Billroth of Brahms, and Dorothy Words- 
worth of William. By a pleasant coincidence, 
I had no sooner noted down the last of these 
names than I came upon this sentence in 
Sarah Orne Jewett's Letters: "How much 
[ 231 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

that we call Wordsworth himself was Dorothy 
to begin with." And soon after, I found these 
words in a letter which Brahms sent Joachim 
with the score of his second "Serenade": 
"Care for the piece a little, dear friend; it is 
very much yours and sounds of you. Whence 
comes it, anyway, that music sounds so 
friendly, if it is not the doing of the one or 
two people whom one loves as I love you?" 
The impressionable Charles Lamb must have 
had many such partners besides his sister 
Mary. Hazlitt wrote: "He is one of those 
of whom it may be said, 'Tell me your com- 
pany, and I'll tell you your manners.' He is 
the creature of sympathy, and makes good 
whatever opinion you seem to entertain of 
him." 

Perhaps the most creative master by proxy 
I have ever known was the wife of one of our 
ex-Presidents. To call upon her was to experi- 
ence the elevation and mental unlimbering of 
three or four glasses of champagne, with none 
of that liquid's less desirable after-effects. 
[ 232 ] 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

I should not wonder if her eminent husband's 
success were not due as much to her creative- 
ness as to his own. 

It sometimes happens that the most potent 
masters in their own right are also the most 
potent masters by proxy. They grind out 
more power than they can consume in their 
own particular mill-of-the-gods. I am in- 
clined to think that Sir Humphry Davy was 
one of these. He was the discoverer of chlo- 
rine and laughing-gas, and the inventor of 
the miner's safety lamp. He was also the 
deus ex machina who rescued Faraday from 
the bookbinder's Hbench, made him the com- 
panion of his travels, and incidentally poured 
out the overplus of his own creative en- 
ergy upon the youth who has recently been 
called "perhaps the most remarkable dis- 
coverer of the nineteenth century." Schiller 
was another of these. "In more senses than 
one your sympathy is fruitful," wrote Goethe 
to him during the composition of "Faust." 

Indeed, the greatest Master known to 

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THE JOYFUL HEART 

history was first and foremost a master by 
proxy. It was He who declared that we all 
are "members one of another." Writing 
nothing Himself, He inspired others to write 
thousands of immortal books. He was un- 
skilled as painter, or sculptor, or architect; 
yet the greatest canvases, marbles, and cathe- 
drals since He trod the earth have sprung 
directly from his influence. He was no 
musician. 

"His song was only living aloud." 

But that silent song was the direct inspiration 
of much of the sublimest music of the cen- 
turies to come. And so we might go on and 
on about this Master of all vicarious masters. 
Yet it is a strange and touching thing to 
note that even his exuberant creativeness 
sometimes needed the refreshment of silent 
partners. When He was at last to perform 
a great action in his own right He looked about 
for support and found a master by proxy in 
Mary, the sister of the practical Martha. 
[ 234 J 






MASTERS BY PROXY 

But when He turned for help in uttermost 
need to his best-beloved disciples He found 
them only negative, destructive influences. 
This accounts for the anguish of his re- 
proach: "Could ye not watch with me one 
hour?" 

Having never been properly recognized as 
such, the world's masters by proxy have 
never yet been suitably rewarded. Now the 
world is convinced that its acknowledged 
masters deserve more of a feast at life's sur- 
prise party than they can bring along for 
themselves in their own baskets. So the 
world bows them to the places of honor at the 
banquet board. True, the invitation some- 
times comes so late that the master has long 
since devoured everything in his basket and 
is dead of starvation. But that makes not 
the slightest difference to humanity, which 
will take no refusal, and props the cynically 
amused skeleton up at the board next the 
toastmaster. My point is, however, that 
humanity is often forehanded enough with 
f 235 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

its invitations to give the masters a charming 
time of it before they, too, into the dust 
descend, sans wine, sans song, etc. But I 
do not know that it has ever yet consciously 
bidden a master by proxy — as such — to the 
feast. And I contend that if a man's deserts 
are to be measured at all by his creativeness, 
then the great masters by proxy deserve seats 
well up above the salt. 

For is it any less praiseworthy to make a 
master than to make a masterpiece? I grant 
that the masterpiece is the more sudden and 
dramatic in appearing and can be made imme- 
diate use of, whereas the master is slowly 
formed, and even then turns out unsatisfac- 
tory in many ways. He is apt to be that well- 
known and inconvenient sort of person who, 
when he comes in out of the rain to dress for 
his wedding, abstractedly prepares to retire 
instead, and then, still more abstractedly, 
puts his umbrella to bed and stands himself 
in the corner. All the same, it is no less divine 
to create a master by slow, laborious methods 
[ 236 ] 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

than to snatch a masterpiece apparently out 
of nothing-at-all. In the eye of the evolu- 
tionist, man is not of any the less value be- 
cause he was made by painful degrees instead 
of having been produced, a perfect gentleman, 
out of the void somewhat as the magician 
brings forth from the empty saucepan an 
omelette, containing a live pigeon with the 
loaned wedding-ring in its beak. 

The master-makers have long been expend- 
ing their share of the power. It is high time 
they were enjoying their share of the glory. 
What an unconscionable leveling up and down 
there will presently be when it dawns upon 
humanity what a large though inglorious 
share it has been having in the spiritually 
creative work of the world! In that day the 
seats of the mighty individualists of science, 
industry, politics, and discovery; of religion 
and its ancient foe ecclesiasticism; of economy, 
the arts and philosophy, will all be taken down 
a peg by the same knowledge that shall exalt 
"them of low degree." 

f 237 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

I can imagine how angrily ruffled the sallow 
shade of Arthur Schopenhauer will become 
at the dawn of this spiritual Commune. When 
the first full notes of the soul's "Marseillaise" 
burst upon his irritable eardrums, I can hear 
above them his savage snarl. I can see his 
malignant expression as he is forced to divide 
his unearned increment of fame with some of 
those Mitmenschen whom he, like a bad 
Samaritan, loved to lash with his tongue before 
pouring in oil of vitriol and the sour wine of 
sadness. And how like red -ragged turkey- 
cocks Lord Byron and Nietzsche and Napo- 
leon will puff out when required to stand 
and deliver some of their precious credit! 

There will be compensations, though, to 
the genius who, safely dead, feels himself 
suddenly despoiled of a fullness of fame which 
he had counted on enjoying in scecula scecu- 
lorum. When he comes to balance things up, 
perhaps he will not, after all, find the net loss 
so serious. Though he lose some credit for 
his successes, he will also lose some discredit 
[ 238 ] 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

for his failures. Humanity will recognize that 
while the good angels of genius are the masters 
by proxy, the bad angels of genius exert an 
influence as negative and destructive as 
the influence of the others is positive and 
constructive. 

How jolly it will be, for all but the bad 
angels, when we can assign to them such 
failures as Browning's "The Inn Album"; 
Davy's contention that iodine was not an 
element, and Luther's savage hounding of 
the nobles upon the wretched peasants who 
had risen in revolt under his own inspiration. 
But enough of the bad angels! Let us inter 
them with this epitaph: "They did their 
worst; devils could do no more." 

Turn we to the bright side of the situation. 
How delighted Keats will be when at last the 
world develops a little sense of proportion, 
and after first neglecting and then over-prais- 
ing him, finally proposes to give poor old 
Severn his due as a master by proxy. Imagine 
Sir William Herschel's pleasure when his be- 
f 239 1 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

loved sister Caroline begins to receive her 
full deserts. And Tschaikowsky will slough 
his morbidness and improvise a Slavic Hal- 
lelujah Chorus when his unseen patroness 
comes into her own. It is true that the 
world has already given her memory two 
fingers and a perfunctory "thank ye." This 
was for putting her purse at Tschaikowsky's 
disposal, thus making it possible for him to 
write a few immortal compositions instead of 
teaching mortals the piano in a maddening 
conservatory. But now, glory! hallelujah! 
the world is soon going to render her honor 
long overdue for the spiritual support which 
so ably reinforced the financial. 

And Sir Thomas More, that early socialist — 
imagine his elation! For he will regard our 
desire to transfer some of his own credit to 
the man in the pre-Elizabethan street as a 
sure sign that we are steadily approaching the 
golden gates of his Utopia. For good Sir 
Thomas knows that our view of heroes and 
hero-worship has always been too little demo- 
[ 240 1 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

cratic. We have been over-inclined, with the 
aristocratic Carlyle, to see all history as a 
procession of a few transcendent masters 
surrounded, preceded, and followed by enor- 
mous herds of abject and quite insignificant 
slaves. Between these slaves and the masters, 
there is, in the old view, about as much 
similarity as exists in the child's imagination 
between the overwhelming dose of castor oil 
and the single pluperfect chocolate drop where- 
by the dose is supposed to be made endurable. 
Already the idea is beginning to glimmer that 
heroic stuff is far more evenly distributed 
throughout the throng than we had supposed. 
It is, of course, very meet and very right 
and our bounden duty to admire the world's 
standard, official heroes. But it is wrong to 
revere them to the exclusion of folk less showy 
but perhaps no less essential. It is almost as 
wrong as it would be for the judges at the 
horse-show to put the dog-cart before the 
horse and then focus their admiring glances 
so exclusively upon the vehicle that they for- 
[ 241 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

got the very existence of its patient and un- 
self -conscious propeller. 

It is especially fitting that we should awake 
to the worth of the master by proxy just now, 
when the movement for the socialization of 
the world, after so many ineffectual centuries, 
is beginning to engage the serious attention of 
mankind. Thus far, one of the chief reaction- 
ary arguments against all men being free has 
been that men are so shockingly unequal. 
And the reactionaries have called us to wit- 
ness the gulf that yawns, for example, between 
the god-like individualist, Ysaye, and the 
worm-like little factory girl down there in 
the audience balanced on the edge of the seat 
and listening to the violin — her rapt soul 
sitting in her eyes. Now, however, we know 
that, but for the wireless tribute of crea- 
tiveness that flashes up to the monarch of 
tone from that "rapt soul" and others as 
humble and as rapt — the king of fiddlers 
would then and there be obliged to lay down 
his horsehair scepter and abdicate. 
f 242 1 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

We have reached a stage of social evolu- 
tion where it is high time that one foolish 
old fallacy should share the fate of the now 
partially discredited belief that "genius will 
out" in spite of man or devil. This fallacy 
is the supposition that man's creativeness is 
to be measured solely by its visible, audible, 
or tangible results. Browning's old Rabbi 
made a shrewd commentary on this question 
when he declared: 

"Not on the vulgar mass 
Called 'work,' must sentence pass, 
Things done that took the eye and had the price . . . 
But all the world's coarse thumb 
And finger failed to plumb. . . . 
Thoughts hardly to be packed 
Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped : 
All I could never be, 
All men ignored in me, 

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher 
shaped." 

Yes, we are being slowly socialized, even 
to our way of regarding genius; and this has 
been until now the last unchallenged strong- 
[ 243 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

hold of individualism. We perceive that 
even there individualism must no longer be 
allowed to have it all its own way. After a 
century we are beginning to realize that the 
truth was in our first socially minded English 
poet when he sang: 

"Nothing in the world is single, 
All things by a law divine 
In one another's being mingle." 

To-day we have in library, museum, gal- 
lery, and cathedral tangible records of the 
creativeness of the world's masters. Soon I 
think we are to possess — thanks to Edison 
and the cinematographers — intangible rec- 
ords — or at least suggestions — of the mod- 
est creativeness of our masters by proxy. 
Some day every son with this inspiring sort 
of mother will have as complete means as 
science and his purse affords, of perpetuating 
her voice, her changing look, her walk, her 
tender smile. Thus he may keep at least a 
gleam of her essential creativeness always at 
hand for help in the hour of need. 
[ 244 ] 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

I would give almost anything if I could have 
in a storage battery beside me now some of the 
electric current that was forever flowing out 
of my own mother, or out of Richard Watson 
Gilder, or out of Hayd Sampson, a glorious 
old "inglorious Milton" of a master by proxy 
whom I once found toiling in a small livery- 
stable in Minnesota. My faith is firm that 
some such miracle will one day be performed. 
And in our irreverent, Yankee way we may 
perhaps call the captured product of the master 
by proxy — "canned virtue." In that event 
the twenty-first centurion will no more think 
of setting out on a difficult task or for a God- 
forsaken environment without a supply of 
"canned virtue" than of starting for one of 
the poles equipped with only a pocketful of 
pemmican. 

There is a grievous amount of latent mas- 
ter-making talent spoiling to-day for want of 
development. Many an one feels creative 
energy crying aloud within himself for vica- 
rious spiritual expression. He would be a 
[ 245 ] 



THE JOYFUL HEART 

master by proxy, yet is at a loss how to learn. 
Him I would recommend to try learning the 
easiest form of the art. Let him resolve to 
become a creative listener to music. Once 
he is able to influence reproducers of art like 
pianists and singers, he can then begin grop- 
ing by analogy toward the more difficult art 
of influencing directly the world's creators. 
But even if he finds himself quite lacking in 
creativeness, he can still be a silent partner 
of genius if he will relax purse-strings, or cause 
them to be relaxed, for the founding of crea- 
tive fellowships. 

I do not know if ever yet in the history of 
the planet the mighty force which resides in 
the masters by proxy has been systematically 
used. I am sure it has never been systematic- 
ally conserved, and that it is one of the least 
understood and least developed of earth's 
natural resources. One of our next long steps 
forward should be along this line of the con- 
servation of "virtue." The last physical 
frontier has practically been passed. Now let 
[ 246 ] 



MASTERS BY PROXY 

us turn to the undiscovered continents of 
soul which have so long been awaiting their 
Columbuses and Daniel Boones, their country- 
life commissions and conferences of governors. 

When the hundredth part of you possible 
masters by proxy shall grow aware of your 
possibilities, and take your light from under 
the bushel, and use it to reinforce the flickering 
flame of talent at your elbow, or to illumine 
the path of some unfortunate and stumbling 
genius, or to heighten the brilliance of the 
consummate master — our civilization will 
take a mighty step towards God. 

Try it, my masters! 

THE END 



[ 247 ] 



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